Trinity University is no longer extending Adobe Creative Cloud rights to students for their personal devices as of this year. The change has already been enacted following a committee decision, with the only way to access Adobe products, such as Premier and Photoshop, being through the school’s computer labs or a personal account. The full suite of Adobe Creative Cloud products costs $54.99 a month per user, the driving factor for no longer offering it to students’ personal devices.

This change came following modifications to Adobe’s pricing structure that rose from the time of COVID-19. During the peak of the pandemic, Adobe made many of their products close to free as everyone was locked in their homes and the education scene was entirely virtual. As classes began to return to a face-to-face format, the company ramped up the prices, which Trinity had continued paying for the past two years for students who used these services.

When it came to evaluating the costs for this year, the Educational Research and Technology Committee found that the significant costs of the programs did not correlate to the amount of students using the expensive licenses. As a result, Adobe’s products are no longer available for all students on their laptops but are now predominantly accessed through the computer labs around campus. Melissa McMullen, associate professor of communication, knows that this change directly affects the classes offered by her department.

“We’ve returned to giving students access only via campus computer labs again,” McMullen wrote in an email. “There are still licenses for select campus media students (TigerTV, KRTU etc.). Of course, for students who have become accustomed to having Adobe software on their own laptops, this can feel like a loss of important tools for many courses and assignments.”

Students have already been impacted by this change, feeling its ramifications in this fall semester. The largest difference in accessibility comes in the hours that computer labs are available on campus. While many computer labs on campus have flexible hours, they still close at midnight. This hinders students’ convenience when it comes to tackling assignments and projects that might be worked on at other times and locations than what the computer labs offer.

With the convenience of Adobe products hindered, some have worried about how this may hurt volunteers in communication-related organizations. Elena Ramirez, senior English and communication double-major, works with TigerTV and assists in their video production department. Despite not personally using Adobe products on her laptop in the past, she expressed concern for the future effects this change may have on Trinity students.

“I have a lot of friends who would constantly video edit on their own devices, and that’s going to be kind of hard for them to schedule that volunteer work for TigerTV or schedule class work since you now have to go to one of the two computer labs instead of conveniently using it on your own devices,” Ramirez said.

Another benefit of Adobe products in the past was that students would be able to utilize the licenses over breaks in the summer and the winter. While away from school, there were often times when students would be able to teach themselves skills using these programs through the licenses that Trinity once offered. Despite this, students can no longer access these services without paying for them when off campus. Matthew Miller, sophomore engineering science and communication double-major, spoke on the impact of the change.

“Over last semester I used a lot of Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, After Effects. I used a bunch of different programs,” Miller said. “I always did it on my own laptops. I would use the ones [at Trinity] occasionally because they have more storage, but that would be only if I really needed it. … I did a lot on my own laptop, which is kind of annoying now.”

With an increased focus on working in computer labs, there may be increased traffic in those areas from what has been seen in the past few years. This may lead to a return of a “lab culture” that individuals such as Althea Delwiche, professor and chair of the communication department, look forward to seeing.

“I think the silver lining about [the situation] is that we do have amazing labs and there’s a sort of lab culture that emerges when people are all hanging out and using those systems. And I feel like we lost that during COVID,” Delwiche said.

Additionally, some professors are looking for alternatives to Adobe products for students to use going forward, which would allow students to once again work through their own devices.

In the future, Trinity may return to funding Adobe licenses if the cost is no longer a barrier for the university. Although Trinity’s Educational Research and Technology Committee found the prices to be too much for this year, future evaluations may be different depending on the requests of the student body.

“If students … say like, ‘Hey, we need access,’ then even though Adobe’s pricing model is ridiculous, and even though the decision that the university made before makes sense, maybe when they’re recalculating things and they’re actually weighing the extent of student sentiment, things will be different,” Delwiche said.