CSUN University News Clippings

For Students Receiving Financial Aid at Williams, Free Textbooks

(October 27, 2009)

By Rebecca Ruiz
Published: 10/26/09

Textbooks can put great strain on a student’s budget. But students receiving financial aid at Williams College will soon be able to swipe their identification cards and get their books free.

The college has announced a new procedure, effective next February, by which students receiving financial assistance will have no out-of-pocket cost for textbooks.

Under Williams’s new system, with the scan of a school ID, costs will be assigned to a student’s term bill, and those itemized costs will be paid directly by college grants. There is no spending limit: all books and reading packets corresponding to the courses in which a student is enrolled are covered. (Registration in a course is verified and monitored.)

Previously, each financial aid student at Williams received a textbook grant for $400 per semester.

But the process, like those of many other schools, required students to pay out of pocket. The idea of parting with hundreds of dollars fueled price consciousness and frugality among Williams undergraduates, with the cost of books influencing the course choices of some financial aid students, said Jim Kolesar, the director of public affairs.

“Students still felt like that was money out of their pocket,” he said.

Williams supplemented its grants with a course materials library for dedicated use by financial aid recipients. But the lending system precluded annotation and highlighting, and it limited those who might want to refer back to materials of years past when preparing for upper level classes or graduate exams.

Williams’s new system enables students to own their books and use them as they like. It aims to take price off the table as a factor in selecting classes.

Mr. Kolesar said the cost of the new system is the same as the old one. “Between the $400 grant and upkeep of the lending library, it works about to be about the same.”

He added of the new program, “It’s a much more efficient and elegant system.”

Williams officials said they did not know of any other school with a similar program.

Publication: The New York Times