Document Type

Report

Publication Date

8-2025

Abstract

The Student Course Materials Cost Survey was administered September 16 – October 6, 2024. It was open to current students at the University of Kentucky (UK). The goals were to help UK Libraries better understand how the cost of course materials affects students at UK and to provide a snapshot of student spending across the university. The questions were based on similar research done at other institutions in Virginia (Virginia Course Materials Survey, 2021) and Florida (2022 Student Textbook and Instructional Materials Survey, 2022). Other work based on those surveys includes the 2023 Illinois Course Materials Survey (CARLI, 2023) and the Pennsylvania Course Materials Survey 2023 (Bay View Analytics, 2023).

Course materials include textbooks, access codes, courseware, and online subscriptions; costs include purchases, rentals, and subscription fees. Students were asked about how much they spent, how their purchasing behavior varied for required and optional materials, their preferred format, how worried they were about affording course materials, and what (if any) actions they had taken to reduce costs.

The survey received 317 usable responses. All questions were optional, so the number of answers to each one varies. Respondents included first-years, sophomores, juniors, and seniors, as well as masters and doctoral students; they represented a wide range of undergraduate majors and graduate programs (see Appendix B for details). In addition to results by student type (graduate/undergraduate), this report also compares first-generation and Pell grant eligible students with overall responses.

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