For the typical college student from a middle class family, MCAT prep costs can be an issue. What makes your materials more cost effective than any other company? Do you foresee in the future that costs of prep materials will increase? Decrease?
I think what makes them cost effective is that you get far more passages for what you pay than with any other source out there.
The absolute cheapest way to be 99.99% prepared for your MCAT is to use BR books, a few BR CBTs, and a few AAMC exams. And if you notice that used BR books sell in the SDN classifieds section for on average what they cost new, they could charge more. The reason they don't charge more comes back to your opening line. Without telling you too much about the owners, everyone of them paid their own way through college. They empathize more than you would imagine, which is why they give more and charge less than every other company out there.
If you consider the behind the scenes costs, then you can reason that BR being small and continually revising their materials prints in small costly chunks. A company like Kaplan that is owned by the Washington Post (a printing company) can print much cheaper. Berkeley Review prints their books on the whitest paper available (for easiest reading) and paper that is fibrous so that it is easier to write on than glossy paper. You never think about choices like this as a consumer, but BR has chosen the absolute best paper medium for their workbooks.
So
when it comes to cost effectiveness for the consumer, it's BR hands down. More passages, better answers, better resale value, and highest quality all play a part in why they're the best.
Building off of my last question, how do you plan on adapting to services that are free? Such as Khanacademy, freelanchteach, etc. Do you think this is overall a good idea for a student to use these if they can't afford shelling out hundreds of dollars for books from your company? Do you think it would be a good supplement to your materials to utilize these?
I'm so glad you asked an agressive question about cost, because every student should ask why it costs what it does. They should do this with every company!
Let's do a cost analysis to see whether a student can or cannot afford to shell out hundreds of dollars for books from our company. Let's say they choose to buy all of the books. It will cost them $310 plus let's say $30 for shipping. They have spent $340. They write on scratch paper and keep the books pristine. After thay are done, they advertise on SDN classifieds and sell them for $275 (the latest average price). They spend $20 to send them out and $25 for Paypal fees. They get $230 back. So
overall they spent $30 on FedEx, $20 on USPS, $25 on Paypal, and $35 to use the books for their studies. That seems like a pretty cost-reasonable way to study using the best books available.
As for utilizing the internet to present free lessons, that's already going on to a small extent with BR. I personally think it's a useful complement to printed study materials, but as only a minor component of preparation. It should be used as a way to gain extra exposure to a particularly challenging topic, but not as a main staple of review. The problem is that as of today the big sites are aiming more for the general population than premeds. There is nothing specifically aimed at the MCAT, besides wikipremed.
As far as making prep more affordable and available, it's sounds like a great plan. But how do you recommend that happens? There is the trick. Do you think it should be supplemented by government aid? The reality is that investing to improve medicine would be a great idea, but how do you convince a politician of how critical that is. All you'll hear back is that you are asking for government aid so someone can get a $200,000/year job in an economy where people are unemployed. Next you could go to the big companies and ask them to not charge $2000 for an online course or $125/hour for private tutoring. That's not going to happen. So at the end of the day you have two options really. (1) Create a community of energized premeds and med students to build a free on-line MCAT course available to everyone. (2) Support the companies that have the lowest prices to keep industry-wide prices lower.
It can change in time, but as of today that is the reality.
You have a great question and valid frustration with the industry on the whole. And not just MCAT prep, which is actually the best bargain of them all given everything you get for the cost, but test prep in general. It's a billion-dollar industry controlled primarily by two big companies. The prices for LSAT, GMAT, SAT, MCAT, and so on courses are out of control. The cost of college is way out of control, and prep companies price accordingly. This has opened a big Pandora's box, but maybe it's time to talk about it. I encourage you to post this same question to all of the companies here. Ask why they charge $11,000 for a course or why they charge so much for access to a server with questions. Open the dialogue and see what comes from it.
