I heard tonight that the library (possibly/probably all of the labs on campus?) is implementing a new printing policy this semester. Students will get the first 50 pages a semester free and after that they will be charged.
I only heard this from another student, so maybe this is just a rumor or it’s an idea that’s currently being considered. However I figured that the collective knowledge of EMUTalk probably had an answer as to whether or not this printing policy is actually happening.
I run the lab in Ford and did not hear this. It would be hard to monitor (unless you are in a lab like the library with someone working there at all times).
I think it’s just a rumor. Printing is why we pay the technology fee. Besides I don’t think it would be very fair to charge us to print of notes and whatnot requested by our professors.
FWIW.
The CS labs in PH don’t get a dime from the technology fees. Before the third floor ICT lab opened, we had an open printing policy. When the ICT lab opened, I enacted a “CS student only” printing policy since we’re basically funded by students enrolling in our courses.
I was surprised at how much money we saved in doing so. We were able to do upgrades to our labs that helped teachers teach and students learn instead of buying paper that was being used, in more than just a few cases, to advertise parties.
I found out in the last week that ICT gets maybe a third of the technology fees. They’re not as flush with money as I thought, and I’m sorry that I helped promote the idea that they got ALL the money.
So if it were to come down to either unlimited printing for students or a slick cool e-mail/network file storage system for students (and staff and faculty), which should EMU fund? The vocabulary word for today is : triage.
And now I get to launch into geezer mode: When I was in school getting my math minor, I bought my own paper for my own dot matrix printer for my wondrous Commodore 64. And walked to school. Uphill. Both ways. With two broken legs. Through erupting volcanoes and Hessian musket fire. Fighting off dinosaurs who were trying to get the stale bagels I sold so that I could support my widowed mother and crippled grandparents.
And I was happy.
I would bet… In less than 2 weeks parking will be a problem.
Does that mean we shouldn’t pay for parking?
How dare the department accept a fee when it knows it cannot provide the service to everyone who would like to come and park.
Why don’t we have redundant parking?
I know the hard working people in parking are aware of this problem and have told management, but those management types love to ignore problems apparently.
This is more than an inconvenience… I need to park to attend classes
I know some of you want to get all technical and declare where I should park, what times lots are available on various days based on class load.. but all that is too technical for me and I have better things to do with my time then deal with technical parking thingies.
I am so non-technical and refuse to learn that I often swipe my parking sticker wrong and have to call the parking helpdesk.. and they are no help at all. Luckily my brother-in-law is always available and he works in parking (he is so much smarter than the parking staff here).
E-Mail.. Heck I won’t be able to get E-Mail when i can’t find parking.
This whole parking thing has me up in arms. We really need to see what this fee is used for and if this continues- maybe we should allocate it to someplace it would do some good.. Like ICT.
Finally, something I actually know something about. The student technology fee.
First of all, remember that the Board of Regents is almost always a “business” board. When it comes to sources of funds, they are unlikely to agree with any restrictions on how those funds can be used. Such was true of the technology fee.
Most schools that levy such a fee have a policy that the funds can only be used to benefit students and teaching faculty. Here, we even have a committee composed of students that decides on how the fee is spent. I know that the CIO at the time lobbied hard for such a policy but was overruled. So, income from the fee was treated by the past two CFOs as simply another income account. When the budget cuts started coming, the fee was hit along with all other accounts and money from the fee was used to cover some of the cut–which basically means that it became general fund monies. At the same time, ICT’s budget was hit as well. (In my book, that’s called a double whammy.) So, expenses keep going up and income keeps going down. I’m sure that approach has continued–especially with ICT under academic affairs where ICT has no say. I’m frankly surprised that ICT (or the students) get ANY benefit from the student fee anymore.
Now, I’m no expert in technology, but I know that you have to have decent budgets to cover existing expenses and adequate staffing, and that new stuff costs big bucks for an institution the size of EMU. I also know that technology plays a big role in attracting quality students and faculty. Where I work now, we use a different system than Banner, but it is mostly the same. You may not like Banner, but don’t you remember what it was like before students could apply online, register online, get their grades online, etc? I can’t imagine going back to the “old” systems. The way EMU funds technology insures that you make no progress and what little you do make will cause something else to fall apart. Good for your competitors, but bad for EMU.
First off, making users pay for their printing in computer labs and libraries is a pretty common practice. That’s the way it is at the U of M libraries– at least when I’ve tried to print things there.
Second, I think it makes a lot of sense for public labs to do something to make users think before they print. The last time I was in Halle, the computer would only let me print things in 5 page intervals. Kind of a pain, but it made me pick and choose what to print.
Dear yourmom,
Did you try yelling at the “parkies” (I have it on the highest authority that words dripping of societal power differentials are only demeaning if the terms are racist and/or sexist) to *stop* doing their jobs and pave another parking space immediately? Or did they seem to be acting too “uppity” at the time?
And since personal responsibility appears to be a “lost art” will you come over and clean the coffee from my screen? I seem to have laughed a little too hard when I read your comment.
I lived on the hill last year and I know there is plenty of parking in North lot, I could see it all the time, the problem is no one wants to walk from way out there.
Printing in the Library — to make it simple, the library shares oversight of the computers with ICT, but ICT oversees almost all of the public computers except the 8 “public research” computers that are located near the reference books and the main info desk where the librarians hang out. These “library 8″ are both for EMU and the general public, so they have had a printing limit of 5 pages at a time for a while. (i.e. a 15 page article requires 3 printings). In the fall these computers will charge 10 cents per copy using a printing card system.
For a long time all the other computers have had no limits or changes for printing, and the waste of paper and toner has been noticeably extreme — especially when there is a printing mistake such as one line per page. I’ve seen on various occasions reams of paper being discarded. Hence, it seems that some kind of sensible pay-as-you-go policy needs to be undertaken.
So here’s what will happen as far as I know right now. ICT will implement a two-semester printing plan using the my.emich login IDs as a way to control tracking, etc. In the fall semester a trial will be undertaken where the cost of each print job will be displayed to each user, “as if” one were being charged. In the winter semester the charges will be implemented, with some kind of free printing allocation given to each student. I’ve heard 200 pages thrown around, not 50, which seems more realistic. I have no idea what the per-page charge will be after the 200 copies are reached.
All computers have the capability of printing or copying files to flash drives, email, even floppies on some. Some of the newer ones may even have CD burners on them. At any rate, one does not have to print if one doesn’t want to, in case one wants to save and print everything back at the room, or at Mom’s house or Uncle’s Floyd’s office. (Kinda like the time-honored tradition taking your laundry home on the weekend)
I hope this helps, this is what I know about this plan right now. We’ll see what develops. I can tell you that the library has been going through $35-40,000 worth of paper and toner in the past several years. So now with these savings maybe we can give more support to the football team — such as undertaking a new study on the effects of having changed the name from Hurons to Eagles.
Thanks for the information, Randal! I too have noticed the huge amount of waste paper generated at the library and various other computer labs (though I think the most frustrating is the habit the printers had of always spitting out an extra blank page. I notice we have new printers so I don’t know if they do the same thing. Hopefully not!), though I wish there were some way to avoid having to implement a pay-per-sheet policy for those students who aren’t exceedingly wasteful.
Ten cents per page is too much. Not all library patrons are students. Some are Ypsilanti residents who use the services because of a lack of resources. A copy card that charges one cent per copy would eliminate most waste, and give disadvantaged people a break.
Thats what they charge at WCC. But the COB just recently uped the number of pages you can print to 50
Actually I agree with Mosh, although paper prices these days might not allow a $.01 charge. But a lower fee would be a good thing. Internally I’ve advocated this for a long time, but some common/typical responses are 1) “that’s what everyone else charges,” or 2) “we can’t do that because Kinko’s will claim unfair competition.” (Just an aside: college campuses are notorious for charging full retail for all these incidental operations that have been outsourced) Printing however is not incidental. When you analyze the costs, and factor in working time, fixit time, parts, etc., one gets a fee that looks more like a copy shop fee structure. And that’s where the argument begins, because we’re being pressured to make a profit too. Even though the student fees should be able to cover printing one’s own schoolwork (a cynic or Republican would call this a subsidy). But Mosh is right, a low fee would cover a lot of basic costs.
The biggest problem I see with printing on campus– in my department, in computer labs, in our department’s computer labs, etc.– is just waste. I think it is generally not on purpose, but if it is really easy to print a 10 page document when you only need one of those pages, I think a lot of people just go ahead and print all 10.
In the public lab spaces, like the library, if there was a mechanism for charging people, it would help cover the costs (as Randal points out) and it would make people think twice about what they need to print. In less public spaces, like in my department, I think there also ought to be some kind of mechanism for regulating how many print-outs folks get, but that’s a whole different issue.
Yourmom,
If you are interested, we have published the results of the annual parking survey on our site. You can check it out at http://www.emich.edu/studentorgs/studentgov/parking.html
Hopefully it helps. If you have questions don’t hesitate to contact me or anyone else within Student Government.
The Hotel Intercontinental in Chicago charged a guy $11.50 for a two page fax that he received.
The WCC TI lab began charging seven cents a copy a few years ago. The WCC Library still allows free internet printing, but that might be changing too. There are still some places for free internet printing at UofM. Michigan State University never stopped charging for printing and Wayne State University charges. There are, however, many public libraries, colleges, and universities through-out Michigan and the United States that provide free internet printing.
Don’t you all wish we lived in a better world? A world where people didn’t waste paper so we just wouldn’t have this problem.
Since I believe in being prepared and only using the library’s printer when I absolutely have to, I think it might be a good idea to have some sort of fee. But I do think there should be so many pages we should have for free. If we had the resources, they could set it up like they do at the Ypsi libraries and run the paper count and fees through your emich ID (for non-EMU students, faculty, etc. I don’t know how this would work). So, let’s say you could get 100 pages for free and each page thereafter would be 5 cents. You have to have money on your emich card to be able to print.
I think this would a. make people think before they print, b. allow for emergencies, and c. help to save the university money.
Obviously, I don’t know if this idea would work, but I think the problem with all of this is people are too reliable on other people/things/etc. Do I think we should be able to rely on a university where we spend X amount of money for tuition? Yes. Is that reasonable? It should be, but that doesn’t mean it is.
I agree with Randal. All those expenses make a printing charge necessary. In fact, the library costs so much to maintain that we better install coin operated devices on each bathroom stall and charge fifty cents. How about fifty cents per minute to speak to librarians at the information desk?
I get the irony and humor of your post, toilandtrouble, or at least up until the last sentence. But there is nothing cool or funny about speaking of a professional woman in such a sexual manner, esp. by name on a site indexed by Google.
You know, I understand the frustration about additional fees. But this is all part of a larger institutional problem, and indeed, a whole state-wide problem about what we’re going to do about higher education in this state.
The rising or new service fees (like printing costs, like the tech fee), rising tuition, and not as many tenure-track faculty teaching the courses all ultimately come back to the long-term efforts of the state of Michigan to get out of the “business” of higher education. We live in a state where we spend considerably more on prisons than we do on community colleges and universities, and Michigan is hardly an isolated case.
I’m no economist of political scientist, but it seems to me that if the citizenry don’t want to pay taxes for public services, then they can’t really expect to get those public services– that is, nothing is free. The same here. If the state wants to keep cutting money to places like EMU and if the BoR wants to keep cutting funds from the academic unit of the institution (while simultaneously funding the football team), then the consequence is that students and the public are going to have to pay for more things out of their own pockets.
I do bet though that photocopying and printing in that hypothetical student athlete study center will be free….
All I have to say is if I have to pay to print off notes that the teacher requires I won’t do it, and the teacher will be hearing about it. I had to print off so many pages for accounting and statistics that the pages of notes were thicker than my book.
Thanks for speaking up on that Abby. The humor fell a bit flat, toilandtrouble, perhaps you could withdraw that last sentence? It is true that ogling is a notorious library activity, so I suppose in the abstract sarcasm is justified, but this was too personal.
Well, if enough people (or at least enough of the right kind of people) decide that a comment is OK, precedence *has* been set to thus make it OK.
I tried to edit it but couldn’t.
Well, since you tried to edit it but couldn’t, I went ahead and changed it for you. –sitedad
Angela can remove at least the name should she still have your email, toilandtrouble. For what it is worth, I can undertand both the saying it and the wanting to unsay it after. ‘Tis very hard to know when to keep mum when one is on the run with a series of jokes.
Warning. Warning. Humorlessness alert.
Interesting, since we’re also having the discussion about Blog policies about editing and so forth. Now that the sentence is gone, our comments seem odd don’t they? This is pretty interesting — if this were a wiki we could see the editing history with comments about why something was removed. I find this a fascinating sidebar to the topic at hand. A meta topic I guess.
Scenario 1
A working mother of three qualifies for health insurance. She has to download several forms, but discovers she needs a copy card and $2.00 for printing. She’s afraid to admit she can’t afford it and leaves. Her children go uninsured.
Scenario 2
An elderly man’s wife has Alzheimer’s. She leaves things burning on the stove at home and almost sets the house on fire. He wants some information on Alzheimers and nursing homes, but discovers he needs a copy card. He is unfamiliar with computers and technology scares him. He walks out the front door, sits down, and puts his face in his hands and cries. He never comes back.
The importance of the library cannot be overestimated. Charging people for copies works like a flat tax. It hurts those who need the most help.