The Course Ready program debuted in the Spring 2025 semester with the goal that textbooks for undergraduate students could be found all in one place for a single fee. This was the first time the university created an opt-out style program where all students were automatically enrolled to receive textbooks for all of their classes.
Wolfpack Outfitters and the NC State Bookstores headed the program aimed at addressing student concerns around the high cost of textbooks and their accessibility. With different majors and classes requiring different amounts of textbooks, creating one program at one price would make the system fairer for all students.
The program replaced the former opt-in-style program for textbooks, All-In, which allowed students in select courses to access their textbooks and course materials through Moodle.
Jeff Haliburton, senior director of Auxiliary Services said the program has seen growth since the spring semester, with around a 10 percent jump in students who remained opted in to the program.
“When we started in the spring semester, a little over six out of 10 of our undergraduate degree-seeking students participated in Course Ready,” Haliburton said. “This semester, we’re just under three out of four. So about 73 percent of students are participating this semester. So we definitely saw growth.”
Haliburton said the largest area of growth in the program was seen in the incoming first-year students compared to upper-level students and last year’s statistics.
“The biggest shift that we saw is for our incoming first-year students, our freshman class, we have very high participation with our freshman class. You know, it becomes the default for the new students on campus,” Haliburton said.
First-year students used the program at a rate of 93%, with second-year students using it at a rate of 85% and third-year and fourth-year students at a rate of 76% and 56%, respectively. First-year students do, however, often take classes that require more course materials compared to upperclassmen, as stated in a report by campus enterprises.
The Course Ready program has allowed the bookstore to support more students than it has in past years. Haliburton said that the amount of materials distributed this year, primarily through Course Ready, has almost doubled from a year ago.
“One of the biggest things we’ve seen, we’re supporting twice the number of students in providing materials to them than we did for the equivalent semester a year earlier,” Haliburton said. “So over 20,000 undergraduate students this semester versus about 10,000 student orders for unique students a year ago in the fall semester. But from a total number of materials that we’re delivering, it’s about a five times increase for the total number of materials.”
David Tully, the principal librarian for student affordability, described how the library is involved with the bookstore and Course Ready, as well as the committees that decide whether the program will be efficient and effective at lowering costs for students.
“We’ve had this textbook affordability committee on campus for a number of years, that they were part of, along with the libraries, along with DELTA,” Tully said. The committee has been a bit quiet for a while now. But we would keep in touch with what each other was doing around this idea of textbooks and making them available and affordable for students and the different programs that we were each doing.”
The libraries joined the bookstore to investigate the model of Course Ready and whether the university should implement it. The library is always in favor of making textbooks more affordable for students, and the Course Ready model does do some of that, Tully said.
Tully said Wolfpack Outfitters is easier for the library to work with since it is run by the university and not by a for-profit company like other universities’ bookstores.
“If it were one of the other models, that would be problematic, they probably wouldn’t have as much interest in helping us as this bookstore does, because we’re messing with their model, making stuff available for free that they want to sell and make a profit from,” Tully said. “That’s always been to our advantage. The bookstore in my experience, they genuinely care about textbook affordability.”
The mission to lower costs has been something that Course Ready has been able to achieve, Haliburton said. While different students in different courses see different results, price premiums have dropped drastically compared to past years, based on NC State averages.
“In 2019, the NC State price premium they were putting on that was something like $1,080 a year. Up until two years ago, that was over $800 a year. With Course Ready, we’re able to bring that down to $279 a semester, so, $560 a year, we’ve been able to dramatically lower that average cost of materials across the board,” Haliburton said.
