Attending Montclair State University costs $13,762 a year if you live in New Jersey, $22,472 a year if you don’t. And approximately another $11,000 a year if you want to live on campus. And on top of that, another $5,170 a year if you want to eat.

It is safe to assume that every student doesn’t have $30,000 in their piggy bank to pay for their education.

Sure, some are financially stable enough to take out loans and have generous parents, but what about the students that don’t? What about the students who have sacrificed countless hours of sleep, social events and most of their college life to work so they can afford to be here?

Certainly, the answer shouldn’t be increasing the cost of their education by requiring textbooks that cost around a hundred dollars. But to our dismay, it sadly is.

While students struggle to make ends meet, “the textbook publishing industry is valued at $3.10 billion,” Education Data Initiative reports.

So, even if you work hard enough to pay tuition, housing and meal plans, you will always have another required sum of money to fork up. It just never seems to be enough.

Textbooks may seem like a necessity to our education and the large sum of money they cost is just something we have to deal with. In reality, they could actually be hurting the schools that are requiring them. Franklin & Marshall College’s student government wrote to…