The Wepa price change-up

To print or not to print? That is the question for Muhlenberg students this semester. Over the summer, Chief Information Officer Allan Chen sent the Muhlenberg community an e-mail informing them there would be $75 loaded onto each student’s Wepa account. Once students exhaust those funds, they must pay out of pocket in order to print.

This is quite a shift from the way things worked last semester, when the Wepa printers were first introduced. In the spring, students started with $25 on their account and when that got low, the school added another $25 at no cost to the student. Now, once students hit that $75 mark, they must add more funds to their own account.

According to the e-mail Chen sent in the beginning of August, he explained that the “quota-based” system was implemented during the summer term and would continue in the fall. Each student gets $75 per semester, and funds left over at the end of one semester will not roll over to the next. Seventy-five dollars, Chen explained in the e-mail, “comes out to more than 800 pages of single-sided black and white prints.” He also pointed out that number was slightly above the 75th percentile of print usage last spring, and is $10 more than the average student printed.

“The primary purpose is sustainability,” says Chen. “When we rolled out the Wepa kiosks, our print usage actually went up. Compared to the past, we were going through a phenomenal amount of paper.” So the price cap was put in place in an attempt to cut back on the amount of paper printed. “We set the quota amount very high (75th percentile) so that we’d support the majority of printing needs.”

Despite the above-average amount of free printing money, many students on campus, including Stefanie Goldman ’18, still feel frustrated. Goldman considers the new quota-based system to be “absolutely absurd.”

“People aren’t just printing things for fun,” she says, “People print because they need to.”

And the way the school went about introducing the Wepa system—starting with unlimited money and then restricting that amount only a semester later—was “a little manipulative” in her opinion.

While she supports the idea of sustainability, Goldman isn’t so sure this is the best way to go about it.

“There are other ways that we could be a lot more conscious,” says Goldman. “If we care so much about sustainability, we could do it in a way that doesn’t cost students such an immense amount.” Her answer: educate students on the food they consume; install more solar panels on campus. But don’t ask students to pay more money.

Tom Littrell, ’18, actually helped bring a more sustainable printing system to campus. He and other students researched more environmentally friendly ways of printing and offered solutions to the administration. The student group did not want to use the Wepa system or a quota-based system; they instead wanted to use a program that would simply remind students to think twice before printing.

Wepa wasn’t exactly what Littrell wanted, but he does think this is an important first step in educating the community about their environmental impact. While he believes it was too early to implement a quota, he says that students need to be thinking more about sustainability at Muhlenberg and beyond.

“It’s important to focus on student behavior that they’ll then carry into the rest of their lives,” he says.

Many students, specifically humanities students, worry that they will have to print too much and will exhaust their funds too quickly. Chen explains that there is an option to submit a written request to OIT indicating that a course is “high-printing.” Once they verify that the course is indeed printer heavy, OIT will add $50 to the student’s account. No matter how many “high-printing” courses a student is enrolled in, they can only add the $50 once a semester. Chen explains that the total allotment of $125 is in the 90th percentile for all printing, “a vast majority, no matter how you look at it.”

Goldman doesn’t worry about her classwork being negatively affected. She says that because her grades are important to her, she will print as much as she needs to, even if that means paying out of pocket.

OIT is reaching out to professors to encourage them to allow laptops and other electronics in class in order to cut back on paper. Chen says they’re also urging professors to consider their own paper usage, “as sustainability isn’t just about student printing.”

Littrell hopes laptops will become more common in classrooms. The fact that everyone on campus needs to be selective with their printing “does help start a conversation between the students, professors, and the administration.” He hopes that once the faculty and administration see just how much students spend on printing each semester, they will begin to change the layout of their classes to accommodate electronics and rely less on printing.

This being the first full semester with the quota, it’s still a trial period for everyone involved. Students and faculty alike are trying to figure it out. “It’s a balancing act, I won’t deny it,” says Chen. “I wish I could say that all printing will remain free forever, but we all share in the need to keep our campus and our operations sustainable.”