June 14, 2010

An article in the June 2010 issue of Campus Technology magazinereports on how college campuses are using print management systems, such as PrintLimit Pro, to save money and the environment. Excerpts from the article by Barbara Ravage follow:

No More Print on Demand

Want to end the student printing free-for-all? Campus policies and print management systems can leverage students' desire to save money and the environment.

FOR MANY YEARS NOW, college campuses have been providing public-access printers, a practice that has unquestionably been a boon to students. But there's a financial and environmental cost to this campus convenience: Anytime/anywhere printing can lead to major paper waste.

Keith Fowlkes recalls the situation just a few years ago on the Wise campus of the University of Virginia, where he serves as vice chancellor for information technology and chief information officer. "Students printed as much as they wanted to whenever they wanted to. They would use a half ream of paper to print out a website they thought was cool, and they'd just leave it on the printer and walk away."

While there are no formal statistics available for quantifying paper waste on college campuses, [a white paper ...] claims that waste accounts for at least 40 percent of what's printed. "If a campus with just 25 public access printers experienced the waste of just one ream of paper each day (500 sheets) per printer," the report hypothesizes, "that would equate to 12,500 wasted sheets of printed paper every day, which is more than 2.5 million wasted pages each year."

More and more colleges are turning to campuswide print management systems to get a handle on printing waste and overall costs. But many institutions have found that installing a print management program along is not enough. If waste is to be reduced and cost savings realized, school also need to incentivize and education students to use these systems wisely.

Paying to Print

"Students will print insane amounts if it's free." So says Thomas Hoover, director of instructional technology support at Pepperdine University (CA), but ask any print administrator and you'll hear pretty much the same thing. To put the brakes on runaway printing costs, many colleges charge students a fee. The amount varies as does the means by which students are charged. Some colleges give students a printing allowance, some do not, but sooner or later students must pay for what they print.

Marquette University (WI) came early to pay-to-print. The school was well-motivated, says Jan Judziewicz, the Milwaukee university's director of applications. "We used to see stacks and stacks of paper left at printers, students not picking things up, not caring, because it didn't cost them anything, it didn't mean much to them."

Marquette began charging students for printing in 1998 ... At the beginning of each academic year, students receive a $21 allowance for printing on their MarquetteCard .... According Judziewicz, about 17 percent of the students don't use any of their print allowance - they either print elsewhere or simply don't print at all - while 43 percent use all of it. The remaining 40 percent stay within the annual quota.

Mercyhurst College in Erie, PA, employs a similar transactional approach: It tracks sutdent printing as a declining balance on OneCard, the student ID and campus transaction card. Students get an allotment of 167 black-and-white pages per trimester. "If they choose to print in color, the value declines at a higher rate," explains John Patterson, Mercyhurst's OneCard director.

UVa-Wise, a small campus in the rural southwestern corner of the state, gives students $30 worth of free printing per academic year. "The funds are in their account on the print server, so whatever machine they use, anywhere on campus, they just log in with their password," explains Fowlkes. "The system knows who they are and how much is left in their print account." When the money runs out, they can top up their account at the campus bookstore.

Pepperdine opted to forgo a print allowance, so students pay from page one. "It's nice to be able to give free things to students, but there does need to be some kind of deterrent or they're going to print as many pages as they want," says Hoover. But, he adds, compared with other institutions, Pepperdine does not charge a separate technology fee and the per-copy charge is relatively low.

Regardless of how they implement their programs, all campus administrators agree that pay-to-print is perhaps the most effective tool for managing student's print habits. Judziewicz reports that Marquette's pay-to-print program was successful "right off the bat," citing a 40 percent reduction in waste and overall printing costs. He's a firm believer that charging for printing is "probably the biggest push" a campus can make toward reducing student printing waste.

...Linking to the Environment

Awareness of the environment is in the air at UVa-Wise, says Fowlkes, whose office is in the new data center and IT office complex, built to Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards. That same awareness went into the decision to adopt a print management system that keeps students informed about the cost of everything they print. "We had to find a way to help students realize that it was not environmentally responsible to print stuff they didn't need," he explains, referring to both the pay-to-print policy and the fact that students can see a running balance on their print account. "We needed to help them understand that paper is a limited resource, and there is a cost that goes along with it." The result? "We saw an immediate 30 percent drop in paper usage on campus when we put in PrintLimit Pro."

Marquette stresses responsible use of printing resources as part of its "Think Green" initiative, tying saving paper to saving money for ecology/economy-minded students.... Mercyhurst's Patterson thinks that students are primed to connect environmental concerns with printer use, and that using print management systems wisely is an easy step for students to take. "They're really very conscious of the greener aspects of the expectations of society," he says. "They not only want to save money, but they're also looking at not wasting paper and printing jobs they don't really need."