Empire’s Textbook Affordability Initiative Boosts Student Success

(SARATOGA SPRINGS, NY — April 14, 2025) It’s no secret that the price of college textbooks has skyrocketed over time. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that textbook costs increased by a whopping 88% from 2006 to 2016 alone. Expenses remain high today: According to CollegeBoard, students at public four-year schools budgeted an average of $1,290 for books and supplies for the 2024-2025 academic year.

Enter Empire State University’s Textbook Affordability Initiative. Established by the library in 2023, the program aims to reduce or eliminate textbook costs for all students by encouraging faculty to utilize free Open Educational Resources (OER). This year, Jennifer Collins—the university’s OER librarian, who joined the SUNY Empire team in 2024—expanded that effort by reinstating Joyce McKnight Fellowships, which support faculty in adopting or developing OER for their courses. Buying library-licensed eBooks and other complimentary resources for student use has also widened the program’s reach.

“Before we broadened our program to include systematic licensing of eBooks for textbooks, only 9% of our courses were affordable using OER,” says Shannon Pritting, SUNY Empire’s director of library services. “Now we are regularly seeing that roughly 65% of our courses are affordable.”

And the savings for students speak for themselves. Over the course of five semesters, the efforts of the Textbook Affordability Program—and the many staff and faculty who support it—have reduced book costs at SUNY Empire by $5 million.

There are other benefits, too. Lowering textbook costs “helps students be more successful in their courses and programs,” Pritting explains. When a student can’t afford a book, he says, they’ll often try to make it through a class without it or, worse, they’ll drop the class altogether.

“This means that it’s taking students longer to get a degree and potentially perform worse in courses if they cannot afford assigned textbooks,” Pritting says.

Statistics bear this out: According to a 2023 National Survey on Student Course Material Affordability by Bay View Analytics, 57% of respondents blamed costs for their enrollment in fewer classes, while 41% said costs resulted in poor grades.

While SUNY Empire’s Textbook Affordability Initiative employs measures to ease or eradicate those costs for students, including offering $150 grants to those struggling to buy their books, the program also works to address textbook prices in other ways. For one, in partnership with Empire Online, the library helps faculty design and revise courses with affordability and quality of teaching in mind. Second, the team is currently working on tagging courses in the Banner registration system to identify which ones use affordable materials. This will make it easier for students with financial constraints to select classes that won’t put additional stress on their wallets. It will also help the library collect data on whether students perform better in courses with low-cost textbooks, Pritting says.

“Our program is now data-informed and can show its impact on students. This has been important for us to plan for the next phase [of the program], which is to see if we can shift to a model where all courses have reduced or no textbook costs,” he explains. “This phase will be more challenging, as we will need to develop new models for access to course resources such as textbooks.” 

To support this development, the library is partnering with the university’s Foundation office and an internationally recognized research firm to secure financial support from an external funder. Ideally, Pritting says, this work will result in additional savings for students—who are always encouraged to reach out to library staff with questions about obtaining low-cost materials—while also helping SUNY Empire serve as an example for other institutions looking to implement similar programs for their students.

“The [Textbook Affordability Initiative’s] main goal is to develop a sustainable program that supports Empire’s vision to be a ‘national leader for high-quality, flexible, and affordable education,” Pritting says. “To do that, we’re focusing on ways we can pair affordability with quality, while using SUNY Empire’s innovative and flexible organizational structure to develop models that could be adopted nationwide.”