Retiring ASI Textbook Reimbursement Scholarship Program

ASI Press Release

Retiring ASI Textbook Reimbursement Scholarship Program

September 2024

For several years, ASI has allocated money to reimburse students for a portion of their textbook costs, up to $150 per student. This has been a successful program and has helped roughly 120 students a semester with the cost of their course materials.

Helping those students was beneficial, but there are thousands of additional students who also struggle to cover the costs of their educational materials. ASI has increased funding for the Textbook Reimbursement Scholarship Program year after year, but there’s still not enough to help all the students in need. (Keep in mind each student only pays $54 a year in student body fees.)

The fact is classes require textbooks and other course materials and the publishers control the costs of those books. Those companies want to make money and they do well at your expense.

Last year, an innovative solution was presented to ASI by the team at the University Library called the SCORE program. Scholarly Communication Open Resources eLearning is designed to tackle the cost of educational materials at the source, by eliminating the need to buy textbooks altogether.

SCORE encourages and supports faculty to convert their courses to free or low-cost open- source e-learning materials. By doing this, there is no cost to students and no need for ASI to reimburse them. What’s amazing about this program is that once a course is converted, it will continue to use those materials every semester, year after year, cutting textbook costs for generations of students!

Last spring, ASI invested $7,500 in the SCORE program and compared it to the number of students helped by the same investment in our own reimbursement program and the results were incredible. ASI’s program helped 69 students save an average of $109 each. The same investment from ASI in the SCORE program helped 443 students save more than $65,000 in textbook costs!

Students do not need to apply to get the benefit of the SCORE program. Faculty apply each semester and receive a small grant to help them convert their course materials. The benefit is immediately applied when students register for a specific class and find that they don’t have to pay for any textbooks.

SCORE is a relatively new program, and more classes are added each semester. If students would like to see their classes converted to no-cost or low-cost materials, talk with the professor and encourage them to apply to the SCORE program through the Library website.

In an effort to maximize the savings to the student body, ASI is placing our full support behind the SCORE program this year. ASI advocated for the University to support the SCORE program and additional funds have been identified in the University budget to convert more classes to free or low-cost materials. We regret that we will not be offering the Textbook scholarship because we believe the SCORE program is a greater benefit to Golden Eagles today and into the future.

If you have any questions about the textbook scholarship program or the SCORE program, get in touch with one of your ASI student leaders or stop by the ASI Office, Room 203 in the University-Student Union to learn more.