Adobe Creative Cloud now available for free to all USU students

Utah State University students will now have free access to the Adobe Creative Cloud.

Adobe Creative Cloud is a set of apps and other programs offered by Adobe, including Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat. According to Madonna Bortle, USU IT Service Desk Manager, Creative Cloud was offered to students at a discounted price, however, this is the first time it has been offered for free to all active students.

Offering creative cloud to students has been an agenda item at USU for a while, Bortle said. “In the past, it was more of a point of not everybody wants it or uses it, so we’ll just do it for those that can purchase it themselves at a discounted rate and then we put it in the labs,” Bortle said.

However, Bortle said the Utah System of Higher Education has been in discussions with Adobe for over a year now in order to get additional discounts based off of quantity. 

“Basically all of the different universities in that organization were able to work with Adobe to get some better pricing, which gave us the ability to do this,” Bortle said. Bortle said  once USU’s original license with Adobe expired in July, USU was able to begin working on making Creative Cloud easy for students to request.

However, it has not been smooth sailing for USU IT in getting Creative Cloud up and running for students. 

Although Creative Cloud is now available for students, students in the past were forced to purchase licenses for themselves for classroom requirements. Students finishing up their degrees this year will only be able to use Creative Cloud until they get their degrees.

“For me, I’m a senior, and it sucks because mine will expire in June,” said Lexie Sharp, a senior at USU who works at the IT service desk. 

However, getting access to Creative Cloud for free is still significantly less expensive than the past student price. Adobe’s website lists student prices as $19.99 per month for the first year, and $29.99 for each additional month.

“We’re learning. Adobe likes to change some of their screens and things, so we are still working through some of those processes, to make it easier for students to sign up for it to make it to where we have all the things in the process,” Bortle said. 

According to Bortle, students have been running into several issues from using their Aggiemail to purchase creative cloud for their classes in the past. 

“One area that we are having problems is that, if you have your personal account, and you’ve been paying for it, then your going to have to go change, in other words that’s not going to merge,” Bortle said. “So if you are using aggiemail, you are going to have to wipe that out. You can’t have two accounts with the same email address.”