Paper for all

For most students, summer is a time of renewal and rejuvenation. Classes are out, beaches are in, and checking accounts are overflowing with disposable income from local Starbucks and summer camps. The rest of us are running on empty, until September or until we keel over and die—whichever comes first. Your savings from last year have been completely exhausted, your hair is falling out while you study, and you’ve run out of blank notebooks. \nFortunately, the one thing we summer students do get more of (besides stress-related pimples and tanning lines) is a printing allotment. Although the unused portion of an undergraduate student’s 650 pages-per-semester printing quota will roll over from the fall to the spring, leftovers are voided after two terms, forcing already drained (mentally and financially) students to shoulder the difference.\nAccording to the UITS Web site, the 650-page limit is “designed so 85 percent of students will not incur any additional printing expenses.” How UITS came to this figure is unclear, but considering the tendency for UITS to inflate statistics to suit their purposes (97 percent satisfied, my ass) it’s likely they just guessed. At 4 cents per page, these low-ball estimates end up costing students huge amounts of money by the end of the semester. This is especially obvious considering a 500-page ream of laser paper costs $7.48 at Staples (.015 cents per page).\nI’m not calling for a limitless printing quota. There’s no doubt that the University needs to curb its paper consumption, but a compromise needs to be found between conservation and the practical demands of academia. \nOne option would be to buy a license to Adobe Acrobat Professional so students could highlight and annotate their PDF notes directly on their computer. Of course, that could cost more per student than a 1000-page quota. \nEasier solutions exist. Absurd as it is, double-sided “duplex” printing eats up two pages of a student’s allotment despite only using a single sheet of paper. If the purpose of the printing allotment is to save a few trees, it only makes sense to set every computer on campus to print double-sided by default. On the other hand, if the University is trying to save a dime on laser toner, then it’s time to stop being so damn cheap. \nEasier still would be a system for moving extra paper from one year to the next, or even just 75 percent of a student’s remaining allotment, using a system like RPS’s meal points, which previously vanished into the ether (i.e. the pockets of greedy, fiscally criminal RPS employees) at the end of the school year. And since it hardly matters who uses the printer, it ought to be possible for a student with unused pages to transfer them to another student. \nThe University has a choice to make: cost or responsibility. If professors continue to insist on assigning photocopied readings, then the school must provide the resources to print them. 1300 pages a year might seem like a lot, but the simple fact of the matter is if 650 pages are enough for 85 percent of students, then 15 percent of students aren’t doing the required reading.