As of next semester, Bakersfield College will no longer be providing printed schedules of available classes. Does anybody care? Not I.
I personally think that the printed schedules were useless to begin with. Whenever I would actually remember to pick one up, I never really looked at it much.
In fact, the one time I did pick one up I completely forgot about it until I found it crumpled in my backpack one day while looking for something more useful. After throwing it out, I told myself I wouldn’t bother with going out of my way to get a hold of something that I didn’t actually need. In the end, it was just trash.
Considering that everyone who doesn’t use cave walls and chisels to communicate uses the Internet to register for classes, it only makes sense to use the Internet to figure out course descriptions along with dates and times of said classes.
Then you can either print the information up or write it down. The process is easy and relatively painless, depending on how the BC website is functioning.
The entire process isn’t something so obscure or new that people can’t figure it out all on their own and then act accordingly. But even though it seems like common sense, there are still people who are somehow jarred by this decision. Try as I may, I can’t quite wrap my brain around it.
Despite it being cheaper for the school (which is facing possible financial difficulties due to state budget cuts), it’s also just sensible. Bearing in mind the cost of printing versus how many students actually benefit from the printed version, there really shouldn’t be any room left for guessing.
For anyone who is seriously upset by this decision: Stop worrying about something so unimportant. You may have heard of choosing your battles in life. This certainly is nothing worth freaking out over.
That is, unless you’re really just that uncomfortable with the Internet that you would rather have a hernia than figuring it out. Then I would have to say that you might have bigger problems than not having a printed schedule.
With the state of the economy and so much more going on in the world and in life, in general, this definitely just does not matter. I am actually surprised that more people didn’t applaud BC for cutting such frivolous things so that the money can be used toward something more important.
What will be construed as more important is beyond my knowing, but I can at least hope that whatever the money saved will go toward, it will not end up making more backpack stuffers.