New students need safety information

I would like to register my disgust over the New Student Orientation Task Force's decision to remove campus safety presentations from the set of mandatory orientations new students receive at the UA. Of all students, first-year students are most vulnerable to becoming victims of any sort of crime, from property crimes to sexual assault. The paltry 20 minutes that both the OASIS Program and the University of Arizona Police Department received was barely sufficient to communicate the most important things that new students can do to increase their safety and seek services. By making these presentations non-mandatory, the UA shows its lack of real concern for the safety of students. It seems it is far more important to move students in and out of the system than it is to make sure their time as students is as safe as possible.

Chad Sniffen
public health graduate student

Students easy prey for textbook publish

I have very much enjoyed your article ("Book prices soar on campus") because it points to a very central problem with higher education in the United States.

I was an international student of the UA until about six years ago in the computer science master's program. When I left Germany to come to the U.S., I could not believe the prices charged for textbooks because they were easily twice as high as in most of Europe. I seriously doubt that supplementary material enclosed with many books is a major factor in book prices. Surely it is a nice excuse but no more than that.

In my humble opinion, the real reasons for this phenomenon are two-fold: 1) Most U.S. universities have a system that effectively forces students to buy certain books, and people who have no choice but to buy a certain book are very easy victims to highly aggressive publisher pricing strategies on the publisher's part, and 2) In the U.S., textbooks are almost exclusively offered in their most expensive form.

You should be even more critical in asking whether this obvious scheme of student rip-off could be eliminated altogether.

Jens Ernst