Undergraduates will have 100 free pages of printing credit starting in the 2019 fall semester, the result of a collaboration between SA, the IT center, the AS&E department, deans, and several University organizations.
“When I was a senator as a sophomore, this was something that people were continuously talking about,” junior and Executive Director of Campus Services Anne Marie Cortes said. “Other schools have some type of free printing for their students.”
The idea of free printing ran through many University and outside organizations before implementation. Passing the idea by University administration presented the first obstacle.
“The school said it wasn’t feasible internally, so we looked at outside companies,” Cortes said.
Once outsourcing free printing proved unfruitful, SA shifted its attention to other possibilities and met with deans to see what further options were available.
Cortes said SA explored many options before meeting with AS&E deans in March. “At the meeting when we came back we discussed the last few ideas we had left and what we came up with was a credit — 100 free pages of credit for students starting in the fall,” she said.
Cortes stresses that the printing is not unlimited.
“One of the reasons there’s a cap on it is because we want to have a sustainability mechanism to it, too,” Cortes said.
“The school has worked hard to […] reduce the amount of paper that’s [being] wasted,” she continued. “We didn’t want to establish a huge free printing thing and then blow away all the sustainability afterward that the University has been working toward,” Cortes said.
After the initiative rolls out in the fall semester, SA plans to review it the following year and possibly make changes. These could include allocating more or less money to the budget, or looking at the free printing model more specifically by major as the amount of printing money students spend varies by major.
Cortes emphasized that the money for free printing will not be added to students’ tuition, but will be “directly from [the] budget” of the Arts Sciences and Engineering school.
“We want to take the feedback that students are giving us and actually do something with it,” Cortes said. “That’s why we really pushed hard for it this semester, so that we could get something done.”
