As published earlier, Northwestern State University has created a new program meant to make purchasing and renting textbooks for students easier. A way to save money is something that any college student can get behind. But when it becomes mandatory, a problem arises.

Some students are confused about why the program was even changed. Students had already gotten used to buying or renting textbooks directly from the campus bookstore or finding versions online to order. This process wasn’t always easy, but it opened up opportunities to find cheaper versions of books. College is expensive enough as it is.

Some students purchase books on their own before the semester ever starts, meaning they have no need for any rentals at all. When opting out of the program, the charges didn’t disappear until Sept. 4, 2021, even though they were supposed to drop by Aug. 31, 2021. It would have cost almost $150 to rent textbooks a student already owned.

The opt-out process is also fundamentally flawed. The only option is to opt out of the entire program, so every single book is dropped. Students who only need one or two textbooks wouldn’t have the ability to rent only the textbooks they need.

When told that textbooks would be included in tuition for the year, one of our editors was excited. That just meant less work for them. However, now they have a textbook for a class that they tested out of, and they can’t opt out because that means they’ll lose the books they need for other classes.

Even a month into the semester, book orders are not being fulfilled. Classes are fully into the swing of things but students are having to find new ways to read the textbooks because the program didn’t account for everyone having a book on time.

If you do go into the bookstore to purchase or rent a book, there are few books available as they’re all being used for IncludED; of the books still on the shelves, almost all of them are lower level classes.

The IncludED program seems great as a concept but it is clear that there are still bugs to work out, ultimately hindered by miscommunication between students and whoever is running this program. It’s a new program, but it was more effective before students were automatically opted in.

Hopefully, this semester will stand to show that kinks need to be worked out in the IncludEd program before it gets re-implemented next semester.