Mississippi State University students will have to pay when printing from public access labs on campus starting this semester. Students’ accounts will be charged three cents for each black and white page and 25 cents for each color page printed from the Computer Commons and Butler Computer Labs. Other labs affected are the residence hall computer labs and any other labs accessible to general MSU students.
Information Technology Services refers to the charge as cost recovery which will help pay for the excess of paper students used in the past.
“Printing in the library alone costs around $50,000 just for paper annually, and that doesn’t even cover toner costs,” Stephen Cunetto, administrator of systems for the Mitchell Memorial Library, said. “Student workers’ wages are another $50,000 a year.”
In order for the accounts to be charged, students must now log in to the computer using their net ID and their Banner password. ITS records students’ accounts, and charges are automatically placed for each page printed.
Students will be able to see the number of print jobs and charges at the end of the month via the Banner Web site. The fee will be consolidated and can then be paid similar to an on-campus long distance bill.
The Computer Commons, located in the Mitchell Memorial Library, and the Butler Hall Computer Lab have not charged for printing black and white copies in the past four years, but increasing student population and diminishing department budgets have been a huge strain on the labs’ sources and a change seemed imminent.
Mike Rackley, head of ITS, said nearly 7.5 million pages were printed in just the Computer Commons and Butler Labs.
When Cunetto attended a meeting for systems directors of universities, Mississippi State seemed to be the only university not charging for printing on public computer labs.
The University of Southern Mississippi and the University of Mississippi both charge students for printing on public computer labs. Southern charges 5 cents per page, while Ole Miss students pay 10 cents for every page they print.
Cunetto said he feels the charge will lessen the large amount of paper wasted because users will have to think twice about whether printing the document is necessary.
“When the (Kenneth) Starr Report came out, students were in the lab printing it, which was about a 50 or 60 page document, just because it was free,” Cunetto said.
The cost recovery aspect was not the only reason ITS decided to use the new login format. The computer labs were also facing the problem of having non-MSU students using the facilities.
“It has been a goal of ITS to have students and employees log in to the computers for three or four years now,” Rackley said. “We’ve known that people not affiliated with the university were using the labs, and when our own students were waiting in line to use their computers, that was not a good situation.”
The login feature will also be used as a security precaution, which the university never had before. ITS will have a better opportunity to track a computer hacker or problem Internet user.
“We’ve never been able to say on this day, at this time, who was sitting at this computer, and this will enable us to do just that,” Rackley said.
Rackley also mentioned how much more the Computer Commons is used compared to the other labs on campus and encouraged those who feel the library’s lab is too crowded to try the others.
“The Butler lab, because it is not located in the center of campus, is a well-kept secret,” Rackley said. “I went to both labs the other morning, and Butler Hall was about 20 percent full, while students were standing in line in Computer Commons.”