Theses for all, for cheap

We all know school's expensive. In addition to tuition and living expenses, there's the cost of paper and other supplies. For graduate students finishing their dissertations, those costs are not negligible, and the University is doing something about it. That might seem like a boring topic, but to IU's graduate students, hundreds of dollars is not a boring issue.\nThis year graduate students completing their dissertations gained the opportunity to post them online instead of turning in hard copies, a significant development for prospective grad school candidates.\nGraduate students cannot receive their degree until they submit a copy of their dissertation. In the past, binding a dissertation to meet these requirements has cost many hundreds of dollars, and cash-strapped graduate students have been forced to pay out-of-pocket for their hard-copy dissertations. That might not sound like a big deal to someone who has never gone through the experience, but the process is much more complicated than using up a fraction of your printer allotment in an on-campus computer lab and putting the sheets into a binder.\nA dissertation requires professional printing on high-quality (and extremely expensive) paper that will last for years in a library. Costlier still is the professional binding process, which runs in the hundreds of dollars. Keep in mind that most graduate students print several copies of the work, which often has taken years to complete. \nIn addition to the monetary setbacks, all this errand-running cuts into the precious time of a busy grad student. Undergraduates who have faced the beast known as I-Core have had a taste of the cost and inconvenience involved in completing a dissertation. We applaud the University for making the switch. \nThis campus consistently ranks among the "most wired" and "most wireless" -- an oxymoron, we know -- but that emphasis on technology almost always makes things cheaper and simpler for everyone involved. That is not to say there haven't been times when technology has made things worse, but electronic dissertations don't seem to have a hidden downside.\nPerhaps even more importantly, dissertations posted on the Web could become more easily accessible than those sitting on library shelves. \nStudents hoping to have their dissertations published would get much more exposure to professionals, and the prominently displayed information contained in online theses will benefit researchers. It's far easier to search an electronic document than to leaf through hundreds of pages in the stacks. \nIn this information age, IU is right on track in making more information available and making research a little more affordable for grad students.\nThis accessibility will benefit undergraduates, other graduate students, professors and the University as a whole. Graduate students matter greatly to the University, and this change benefits them at no cost to anyone else.