Costly Prints

Until the fall of 2010, the cost of prints on campus was free.  Whether you were printing in color or black and white students were held at no cost or limits.  I am sure this was costly for the University.  Some students took major advantage of this access and printed endless amounts of junk.  This abuse of student’s printing privileges forced the University to implement a new printing policy.  The University took a dramatic step and is now charging fifty cents for every colored print and ten cents for every black and white print.  This is a pretty drastic change for most students at Missouri Southern.  I feel that on top of the increased cost of tuition and the new recreation activity fee this is just unnecessary added cost.  Students are already paying for their class, within in this fee should include access to printing the notes required for the class at no added cost.  If each power point is twenty pages long and you are required to print off a new one for every lecture that is two dollars per class period.  Multiply that number by the number of times an average student has that class a week, three, and in just one week you are spending six dollars.  Now let’s multiply that number by four, the average number of classes a student is enrolled in a semester, and the cost for one week of printing notes is twenty four dollars.  Multiply this number by the number of weeks in a semester and you have soon found yourself paying an extra three hundred dollars on prints for your classes.

I honestly never realized how expensive this new policy was until I was writing my practical proposal paper.  I do feel that within the cost of tuition that each student pays for each class should come with access to their notes required for that class.  Whether the teacher prints them out of each student, which is probably an inconvenience for the teacher, or the students have access to free prints to obtain these notes required. 

I never thought about the inability for students to be able to afford this new cost.  Some students already are up to their neck in loans for school.  Any extra money goes to their cost of living and food.  Telling these students that they must now pay for each print may turn them away from printing out this information.  If this information is not printed out they are in return jeopardizing their academics. 

I feel the University should look for a more appealing way to keep them financially stable, but also keep the interests of students first and for most.  I am sure that the school is trying to make up for all the money they probably lost when prints were free, but they should start looking for a new way to keep the students happy.

After writing my practical proposal paper for our third paper I realized I might actually turn in my proposal and get this shananigains fixed.