Pierce already offers a variety of resources that are freely accessible at home.
With more than 70 online databases and services such as Word, PowerPoint and NetTutor, students have no trouble finding a way to do their projects and essays.
However, that barely takes into account some of the other projects that students have to do.
Pierce College should make it so that all Adobe Creative Cloud products like Photoshop, InDesign and Premiere Pro, are offered free to download for students.
By having these applications, students would be able to not only retouch photos but also create digital art and produce and edit videos.
Although writing essays has learning value, having physical work that can be shown to hundreds of people and also be included as a known skill on a resume is more impressive.
According to an article on the Adobe site, a survey of more than 5,000 people showed that “Most U.S. respondents believe businesses that invest in creativity are more likely to foster innovation (88 percent), be competitive (88 percent), provide better customer experience (88 percent), have satisfied customers (89 percent) and be financially successful (85 percent).”
Despite there being student plans, the products can be quite expensive. Adobe’s photography plan, which only includes photo editing applications such as Lightroom and Photoshop, is its cheapest plan at $9.99 a month. As for the other applications, a single app can go for $20.99 a month. For the whole collection, with the student special offer it’s $19.99 a month and $52.99 without the student offer.
California State University, Northridge and California State University, Fullerton offers these products to its students for free.
CSUN covers the cost with its student campus quality fee and the rest is covered by the different college divisions. Increasing the other fees students have to pay can most likely help the college cover the cost.
Pierce, however, could just offer the products for free for only one year. That way students can decide to choose to download it when they need it for a class that requires its use.