While California State University students pay some of the lowest tuition in the country—just over $6,000 per academic year for undergraduates as of fall 2024—the CSU acknowledges the total cost of attending college can be much higher. Living expenses like housing, food and transportation continue to rise and can be a barrier to student success.
The CSU has made a significant systemwide effort to help students avoid financial barriers and earn a degree sooner through the Graduation Initiative 2025 and the Basic Needs Initiative, as well as through Affordable Learning Solutions (AL$). Established in 2010, AL$ is designed to save CSU students money by encouraging and enabling faculty to choose and provide free or low-cost educational content.
AL$ recommends a combination of open educational resources, library materials, digital or customized textbooks and faculty-authored materials that, when combined, save CSU students across California approximately $77 million annually, as of 2021. Since the launch of the program, CSU students have saved more than $390 million.
By reducing CSU student course material expenses, more students acquire the course materials they need to succeed and benefit from their learning experience.
“Zero-cost course materials programs can lower potential barriers for students while supporting student retention in their learning pathways," says Leslie Kennedy, assistant vice chancellor of Academic Technology Services and Affordable Learning Solutions at the CSU Chancellor's Office.
Additionally, the multi-year compact between California Governor Gavin Newsom and the CSU, established in 2022, directs the university to reduce the cost of instructional materials by 50% by 2025—a goal the CSU is on track to achieve.
“Affordable Learning Solutions ensures opportunities in education for all.”
—Elaine Correa, CSU Bakersfield
What is OER?
Open educational resources (OER) are teaching, learning and research resources that are in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use and repurposing by others. The format varies and can include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software and any other tools, materials or techniques used to support access to knowledge.
“Open educational resources blend inspiration and innovative thinking together to foster positive social change with free and open access to course content and ancillary materials for all students," said Elaine Correa, special assistant to the provost at CSU Bakersfield.
In addition to managing OER repositories like MERLOT and COOL4Ed, which provide access to curated online learning and support materials, the CSU Chancellor's Office works to encourage and enable faculty to adopt low- or no-cost course materials. This is achieved by providing training and education on the various OER and low-cost options and where to find them, curating faculty OER adoption showcases, providing financial incentives to revamp courses and more.
Most CSUs have at least one voluntary AL$ coordinator who is responsible for implementing and leading their respective campus AL$ initiative. Thanks to the work of these dedicated individuals who represent faculty, librarians and staff, more than 31,000 course sections have been converted to zero-cost course materials course sections since 2018—when data was first collected—across the 23 universities.
And the CSU isn't gatekeeping its successful OER adoption strategies. The university coordinates an intersegmental conference, Cal OER, every summer that focuses on OER efforts and impact across the state's three public higher education systems. The 2024 conference will be held on August 7 and 8.
“We all work together regularly to collaborate on many of these affordability issues, and we support one another in our various initiatives as much as possible," Kennedy says. “Our work around zero-cost course materials has highlighted a very strong intersegmental partnership in the California higher education space."
Another example of intersegmental collaboration is how the CSU supports the California Community Colleges' zero-textbook-cost program by incorporating OER course materials into the COOL4Ed digital library, as designated by the California legislature.
The Role of Campus Libraries
Campus libraries are also doing a great deal of work to help students and faculty discover low- or no-cost learning materials. For example, the university bookstore can share a list of textbooks that the faculty have selected for each semester with the library, and the library can use AL$ funding to hire students or staff to search their databases for those materials.
Librarians will then publish a list of all the materials that are available in the library databases and notify the instructors so they can let students know in their syllabus that they can access the textbook via the library.
“The librarians here [at CSUN] are very concerned about affordability issues for our students," said Mark Stover, dean of the University Library at CSUN. “They saw a synergy between information resources—which the library is in the business of providing—and traditional textbooks and are hoping to find that sweet spot where students can find low-cost or no-cost alternatives to the traditional high costs of print textbooks."
CSU campus bookstores also work with publishers to negotiate huge discounts for the system and, in some cases, provide funding to campus libraries to enable them to be able to purchase eBooks and provide perpetual access to them. These efforts alone are saving students around $30 million a year.
"So many of our Affordable Learning Solutions coordinators are OER librarians, and they're being hired specifically to support zero-cost course materials efforts," Kennedy says.
Bookstores Provide Access to Materials from Day One
Several CSUs have opted into flat-fee programs in which campus bookstores negotiate with textbook publishers for the lowest possible prices and students get access to all the course materials for the classes they're enrolled in for that term. This includes supplemental learning platforms like McGraw Hills's online tutoring and assessment program ALEKS. An additional benefit of the opt-out, flat-fee model is predictability for the purposes of cost of attendance and financial aid.
Programs offered by the 23 CSU campus bookstores saved students nearly $49 million in 2023-24, and 77% of those savings were from these access programs. Although the names of the programs are customized and differ campus-to-campus, they provide either a campuswide flat-fee model for all courses or on a course-by-course basis.
Day 1 Textbook Access (D1TA) is a Cal State Long Beach textbook program that provides students with access to all their required textbooks at one price, on the first day of classes each semester. Based on the Equitable Access program and supported by a CSULB Associated Students, Inc. Senate Resolution, the goal of D1TA is to achieve student success through access, affordability and sustainability. The program will launch in fall 2024.
San Diego State began its textbook program, Day1Ready, in 2022 and has since saved students close to $14 million on new printed materials and more than $7 million on digital course materials.
The way Day1Ready works is that students are preenrolled into the service and charged a flat rate per credit hour. Once a student registers for a course, the textbooks and materials are added to their Canvas account, sometimes up to several days before the class begins.
The program currently serves 80% of all SDSU undergrads, meaning approximately 25,000 students have all materials in hand on the first day of class. First- and second-year students are taking advantage of the program with a combined 90% adoption rate, according to SDSU Bookstore data.
Hannah Burington, a second-year SDSU student majoring in statistics with an emphasis in data science, said her courses require a heavy load of materials. For her, the convenience of early access and companion study aid applications were equally valuable.
“Not only did I have access to the textbooks for all of my classes but it also helped me with some interactive coursework," Burington said, adding that there are other programs she was able to use, like software apps to help with homework.
And, nearly 20,000 Cal Poly Pomona students have opted into its Instant Access Complete program since it launched in 2023. CPP undergraduate students pay a flat rate of $250 and graduate students $150 for the semester—significant savings when you consider California college students spend $938 per year on textbooks and materials, according to the California Student Aid Commission's 2021-22 Student Expenses and Resources Survey.
Zero-Cost Degrees
In addition to converting tens of thousands of courses to include low- or no-cost learning materials, CSU faculty are creating entire pathways to earning a degree without paying a dime for learning materials, nicknamed “Z-Degrees," or “Z-Majors."
CSU Channel Islands became the first CSU to offer a Z-Major in 2018 with the launch of two zero-cost degrees in Communication and Early Childhood Studies. The university has since launched a third Z-Major in Health Science. CSUCI's Special Education Credential program (“Z-Cred") and Nursing Track II RN-BSN program (“Z-Track") have also developed no-textbook-cost pathways.
This was accomplished by replacing traditional textbooks with OER, eBooks, library materials, government reports, online courseware, open access journals and more.
CSU Bakersfield launched its first Z-Degree in fall 2023—a pathway of general education courses for students to earn a bachelor's degree in the Department of Child, Adolescent Family Studies (CAFS).
Over summer 2023, several CSUB faculty members undertook the considerable work necessary to shift their general education courses from reliance on expensive textbooks to high-quality open educational resources.
Challenges remain, Kennedy says, because while there are many OER options for general education courses, there are much fewer available for upper-level courses and faculty members have to spend time creating their own.
“Faculty have to be committed to it but also have to see value in it," said Elaine Correa, special assistant to the provost at CSUB. “When you use a textbook, it's very easy because the materials are there, slide decks, quizzes, tests and so-on. When you adapt to OER, you must create all the supplementary and ancillary materials. The materials must be ADA and copyright compliant. It's a huge workload."
But the reward, according to Correa, is the cost savings to students, especially her CAFS majors, who enter careers after graduation that don't pay as well as some other professions.
"Starting off in this field, students don't earn a lot of money, but their roles are essential to society and can change the trajectory of lives of children and entire families," Correa said. “So how can we address those gaps? We're trying to make sure our students start with an equal chance. Affordable Learning Solutions ensures opportunities in education for all."
To learn more about how the CSU is reducing financial barriers to earning a degree, visit the Affordable Learning Solutions website.