It was free, it was easy, and its name made students feel helpful. But in an era of tightening budgets and rapidly increasing usage, College administrators say Greenprint is no longer green, and, effective this term, it's also not entirely free.
Under a new plan aimed at cutting costs and waste, each student receives a $30 credit for use at GreenPrint. This amount allows students to print 600 black and white pages at five cents per page.
After the 600-page quota is used up, the five cents per page price will be charged to the student's DASH account. Printing duplex, or double-sided printing, will provide a slight discount -- each page now costs seven cents. Color printing is no longer provided free of charge. Each page will now cost 49 cents.
The computer will also keep track of how much money each student has left on their account, so that people can tell how many free pages they have left.
The changes to the black and white printing costs won't, however, affect most students. "The median [last year] was about 250 pages," said Computing Services Operations Manager Mike Hogan, "[so] 600 is far above."
Computing Services consulted several student organizations, including the Student Assembly, the Environmental Conservation Organization and the Green Key Society before deciding on the new policy.
ECO Printing Intern Callie Thompson '05 said she was pleased by the opportunity for student input and understands that printing quotas were inevitable.
"Hopefully this will discourage students from using GreenPrint for non-academic uses like flyers or to print out photos of their friends," Thompson said. "Dartmouth would love to pay for that but fiscally cannot continue to with the current rate of GreenPrint use."
The College estimates that of the six millions sheets sent to public printing each year, a third are wasted, according to Computing Services' website. That waste consists of cover sheets and unclaimed jobs.
Still, some students said that they are being unfairly penalized for a few students' irresponsibility.
"It's a slap in the face for people who use printing responsibly but print more than 600 pages," Laura Crowson '03 said. "I can see people are going to start bartering for printing. People have already asked me if they could use some of my pages."
In certain departments, like the humanities and some sciences, numerous pages of lecture notes need to be printed out for class or to study from. And with the increased reliance on electronic course documents from Dartmouth's Blackboard website, students are concerned that they will be forced to pay for printing out these required pages.
"It's unfair that they have to start charging people to use the printer. I'll be printing out lecture notes to help me study. That's probably where most of my pages come from. Everyone's going to be hit widespread," Zachary Smith '06 said.
Some systems are being put into place that would increase the 600-page quota. A faculty member may request an increased quota for a group of students. And, according to Thompson, a college committee may be formed to decide who can be in a higher limit.
As to the concerns of students on financial aid, Thompson said students would be able to "apply to [that] college committee, and there will be a standardized form that they can fill out and [the committee] can then go through and say if you match these qualifications, we'll put you in a higher tier of usage," she said.
"It shouldn't be a problem for probably 99 percent of the students. We just need to be fiscally and environmentally responsible," Thompson added.
