College students are no longer able to get by with just a few textbooks and some pencils from their local bookstore.

Computer software is an essential purchase for almost every student studying anything from art to psychology, and it is expensive for some.

While Central Michigan University students pay $150 for a copy of Microsoft Office, Eastern Michigan University students pay $129, Michigan State University students pay $65 and University of Michigan students pay $47.17.

Microsoft Office 2007 Student Edition for PC and 2008 for Mac are two of the biggest sellers across all university bookstores. Prices often are a function of who is shaking hands with who at an institution.

“Currently, EMU has no licensing with Microsoft,” said Steve Schindler, the bookstore manager at EMU.

EMU is attempting to renegotiate a licensing deal with Microsoft to provide better prices to their students.

In an e-mail to Central Michigan Life, CMU Bookstore Director Barry Waters said CMU does not have a licensing deal with Microsoft and that is why it costs more.

“We do not have Microsoft Student Licensing, which I believe both MSU and U-M have. This is an institutional decision to offer Microsoft Office at a reduced rate,” Waters said. “We carry Adobe Student Licensing, which allows us to sell Adobe’s most popular products at a price 85 percent less than regular retail.”

The Master Collection, an exhaustive compilation of most of Adobe’s popular creative products from Acrobat to Photoshop to InDesign, retails for $499 at MicroChips, but is $2,499 for mainstream consumers.

“All the prices are student license prices,” Madan Maley, a MicroChips clerk and India grad student, said. “They’re much cheaper compared to other stores.”

But while educational discounts are a standard for college students purchasing software nearly everywhere, the prices they pay are not necessarily the same.

Although WMU, U-M and MSU students all pay roughly the same price as CMU for the Adobe Creative Suite, EMU students pay $999 for the Adobe Master Collection.

Not all software price tags vary drastically, however.

Mac OS X v 10.6 Snow Leopard, the newest operating system for Apple computers, is available for $29 at all five universities.

Final Cut Studio, a professional quality video editing suite from Apple, retails for $299 at U-M, MSU, WMU and EMU.

E-mail the author: Connor Sheridan