Supporting 1,300 computers, 35 labs, and 52 printers, IT Services’ Glenn Morgan, Customer Service Manager and Kathy Skurzewski, Student Computer Labs Supervisor, have been working to make changes. This semester and into the future, a quota of 800 pages has been applied to all students, faculty, and staff for printing. The change has in part occurred because a small portion of students were being wasteful with existing printing privileges.
“It is our observation that in the majority of printing, students are doing what they are supposed to,” Morgan said. “But students are doing things outside the bounds of school work. We know there are people printing out reams of paper for their church groups and businesses,” he said.
Morgan says the “decision wasn’t made in haste,” and that many other colleges that already have print quota systems in place were consulted in the choice.
With both money and the environment in mind, the print quota has been helpful to other campuses in Indiana.
“We did a lot of talking with our peers at West Lafayette. Their experience was an immediate 30-40 percent reduction in print usage as soon as they implemented it,” Morgan said.
The group also talked with Ball State, Indiana State and IU Bloomington. Bloomington has a 650 page quota. Purdue North Central has a 400 page quota and also differentiates according to course load, which means students with more classes get more pages able to print for free.
Last spring, IT Services loaded software, appropriately named “PaperCut,” which they are now using to monitor print usage.The department tested out the “PaperCut” system starting in February of last semester. The results were surprising to Morgan. The average number of pages per student per semester was 346. IPFW printed 4.741 million pages in spring of 2010.
But Morgan said the issue isn’t about collecting money from students if they go beyond the 800 page limit.
“The most important thing I want people to know is that we are not doing this for money. We’re going to take the savings and we’re going to get color printers for the students,” he said. “I would be 100 percent happy if we don’t collect a penny off this from students. That would be ideal,” he said.
Morgan welcomes student support and suggestions.
One Student Government Officer also welcomes suggestions and intends to evaluate the change carefully.
“Let’s have a good tone and attitude towards the print quota before we pass judgment,” Vice President of Legislation Anthony Decker said.
Overall, Morgan expects a 20 percent decrease in the usage of paper with PaperCut system.
