Some graduate students at UNM are perturbed by the Graduate and Professional Student Association council’s decision to no longer provide free printing services to students.
The Graduate Resource Center and GPSA provided graduate students the facility to print their assignments and class readings for free. But effective immediately, as a result of the council’s decision, they will have to pay for printing.
Adnan Bashir, a computer science graduate student, said that the decision will increase the burden on students. It will be especially hard on those students who are studying at UNM while financially independent, he said.
“Graduate students get a lot of assignments; we have to print hundreds of pages every day,” he said. “It means we will have to pay extra money for printing now.”
GPSA President Texanna Martin said the council’s decision was based on fiscal responsibility and the year-to-year budgetary constraints that GPSA is facing.
“GPSA lab expenses were not approved through the budget process in Spring 2015, which resulted in us working with IT to safeguard this important resource for our graduate and professional students,” she said. “We were excited that IT was willing to work with us to design a discounted printing opportunity that would maximize the $10.00 provided through the LoboCard.”
Martin said the council made the decision to offer subsidized printing instead of free printing after doing a financial review of the GPSA.
“In fact, UNM IT reported our lab as having one of the highest printing volumes across the entire campus,” she said. “With our budget decreasing yearly, we made this prudent decision to subsidize instead of eliminating the cost altogether because it was lessening our ability to execute other programs.”
Hilary Wainwright, Graduate and Professional Student Council chair, said the council was concerned about students who rely on the GPSA printing services, but in the end the vote carried because the GPSA budget simply could not support the free printing service.
She said that by partnering with IT and advancing with the current program, GPSA was able to keep printing at a discounted rate for graduate students.
“The cost to print is two cents for single-sided and three cents for double-sided,” she said. “This discount was preferable to the real possibility that we would wind up having to stop offering printing at all.”
Martin said the GPSA printing budget was $4,778 for the 2013-14 academic year and $4,008 for the 2014-15 academic year.
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“However, the budgeted amount was not enough, which forced GPSA to ask for an appropriation to cover additional costs,” Martin said.
Wainwright said the GPSA budget for printing for the 2015-16 academic year was $0. If GPSA had not partnered with IT, resulting in IT covering all printing costs, the entire $4,000+ needed to provide free printing would have had to come from the appropriation fund resulting in less money being available for graduate student organizations to receive appropriations.
“The discounted printing services currently offered by GPSA allow graduate and professional students to print 500 single-sided pages or 333 double-sided pages per semester, so we still encourage students to come use the lab and take advantage of the discount,” she said.
Several departments across campus offer free printing for their students: the Anderson School of Management, the Physics Department, and many of the resource centers, Martin said. The College of Education provides $7.50 per week to its students for printing, and each student is provided $10.00 in printing each semester through their LoboCard, Wainwright said.
“Unfortunately, this will impact some students, especially those students who do not receive free printing privileges from their departments,” she said.
Wainwright said IT will be able to continue the research it began last year and provide the council with reports on printer usage throughout the upcoming Fall and Spring semesters.
“We will be able to see how the fees impact usage and utilize those reports to determine if this pilot program is successful,” she said.
Sayyed Shah is the assistant news editor of the Daily Lobo. He can be contacted at assistant-news@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @mianfawadshah.
