Miller Woodall (’27) frequently used the Adobe suite, which had been accessible to Rollins students on their personal devices for free from the COVID-era until late September of this year. Now, when Woodall logs into the Adobe suite via Rollins’ Okta portal, she cannot access most Adobe services and is prompted to sign up for a free trial.
Woodall said, “I have been using Adobe products for photography and graphic design since 2020 through two different school subscriptions (high school and college). With these new changes that Rollins announced, I no longer have access to Adobe products on personal computers. This has made my photography classes on campus much more difficult, because it requires me to edit in the computer lab and not on my personal laptop.”
Students who used Adobe services through Rollins during the past year received an email on Aug. 18 that they would no longer be able to access those services on their personal computers after Sept. 15, when access lapsed. The email also noted that the “Adobe suite of products will remain available from computer labs on campus” and that “Adobe has changed [its] licensing structure.”
According to Troy Thomason, chief information officer and assistant vice president of information technology at Rollins, the driver behind the change was the expiry of Adobe’s COVID-era contract with Rollins and resulting price increases. “It just wasn’t financially feasible.”
“To be honest, before COVID, it was the same way: students did not have access via Rollins to install Adobe software on their personal machines. However, computer labs were a lot less viable during COVID. Luckily, Adobe and many vendors gave us pretty good discounts and grace as it pertained to such an upheaval.” The result of Adobe’s discount with Rollins was personal computer access throughout the extent of the contract, even when lockdowns ended and computer lab access returned by 2022.
According to Thomason, “at the end of the five- or six-year contract, Adobe decided to renegotiate, and their cost” —an increase of 400% compared to the previous contract— “exceeded the ability to install on students’ personal machines. We attempted to negotiate, but we were left with a difficult choice because of the extreme increase in pricing.”
Thomason notes that Rollins College does not have and never had access to usage statistics of Adobe products. The only data retained by the college was through logins via the Okta student portal, which was used to decide which students to email when access was lost: “to keep the noise level down, we didn’t notify people who hadn’t logged into Adobe according to our records.”
Some (though not all) Rollins faculty and employees, including student employees, continue to have personal access to Adobe products under the college’s reduced subscription model. Thomason said at this time, “no academic departments have requested access to personal computers. Adobe requires Rollins to license a minimum percentage of our entire student body. One thing we were trying to do with them was figure out who was using it and just leverage the service” for those users. However, without data from Adobe on usage by Rollins students, making this pivot was not possible.
Thomason said, “we took [the negotiating challenges] to our Technology Governance Committee, which has representation from all the divisions of the college, including faculty and an SGA representative.” They played a key role in the decision to reduce Adobe’s service offering due to the costs of continuing the current access level on students’ personal computers.
Access to Adobe products will remain unchanged in the computer labs on campus. Rollins maintains a webpage showing which software is available on which computers. Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Creative Cloud are available in Olin Library rooms 220, 225, and 244; Cornell Fine Arts Center room 113; Bush Science Center rooms 301 and 310; and Cornell Hall for the Social Sciences room 133.
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