Pricing Printing

I’m not an economist by training or even by disposition, but my job requires me to think in economic terms on a regular basis. My latest challenge is to figure out a pricing scheme for charging for printing on campus. Free printing, like free anything, is an example of what economists call the tragedy of commons, where a public good is overconsumed because there is no incentive for the individual consumers to moderate their consumption.

Why should students who pay upwards of $50,000 a year to attend our school have to be nickeled and dimed by being asked to pay for the print-outs that they need to make because their professors assigned them 1,000 pages of electronic reserves, or asked them to do peer-review paper exchanges of their 20 page paper with 5 of their classmates?

One answer is environmental. Because there is no cost associated with printing, our students (and the rest of the community, for that matter) print roughly 1,000,000 pages every month. They print out their reserve readings over and over again because they forget to bring them to class, or because they forgot what printer they printed them out on, or because the copy they already printed out is in their dorm room. They don’t do soft proofs of their papers on screen, but instead print out multiple drafts to get the layout and formatting just right. If there was an actual out-of-pocket cost to printing, much of this printing would just stop.

One answer is accidental. If one were to look back over the history of printing in the last fifty years, you would discover that up until the last years of the 20th century, the idea that your college would cover this sort of expense would not have even come up. Before photocopiers and laser printers, students got their reading materials from the bookstore or the library, and they produced their written work on typewriters or by long-hand. With the advent of the photocopier, students could start to (on their dime!) make copies of reserve readings, and bookstores could produce coursepacks that students could purchase. As for typing, students bought their typewriter ribbons and typing paper (and white out!) usually at the bookstore. With the advent first of the laser printer, and then of the web, suddenly the paradigm shifted. Some schools quickly figured out that free printing services created the aforementioned moral hazard, and immediately imposed charges.

Middlebury missed that boat.

So here we are having to think about how to bring some order to what is by all accounts a messy situation.

Question One: Should we institute a quota? Some schools provide students with a quota, and only charge them for their printing after they exceeed their quota. Some economists argue that this is a bad idea, as it creates a new, albeit less severe, moral hazard.

Question Two: If there is a quota, should it be the same for all students, or should it vary based on the amount of writing or e-reserves assigned in the course? or on financial need?

Question Three: In our current economic climate where we are having to cut budgets, what is the objective in introducing a charging scheme? Should our pricing be so low that printing costs are still subsidized, but just less so than our present system of not charging at all? Should we try to recover all the costs associated with printing? Should we be so bold as to try to change our printing system from a money-loser to a revenue source, allowing us to (for example) increase the amount of internet bandwidth or wireless in the dorms?

Question Four: How do faculty connect to this? In the same way that responsible faculty factor in the cost to the student when choosing texts for a class, should faculty begin to factor in the printing cost when assigning reserve readings and writing assigments?

There is some urgency to these questions, as our intentions are to introduce a quota and charging scheme in the Fall of 2009. We’ll be spending the spring thinking about these questions, talking with faculty, students, and other schools to figure out the right way to proceed. Use the comment feature of this blog to record your own thoughts, or track down a member of SLAC (the student LIS advisory committee) to voice your opinion.

4 thoughts on “Pricing Printing

  1. Pingback: The Price of Printing: Who Will Pay? « MiddBlog

  2. Arabella Holzapfel

    Why does this blog not appear in the list in the left column of ‘go/blogs’?

  3. Arline Culp

    As a parent, I have a few questions. What are the current printing costs per person? Per student? Is ALL of that subsidized or does a portion come out of our yearly 50K – if so, how much? It would be useful to know which direction this is headed. I think we would rather provide and take responsibility for our own printing costs than get involved in “charging schemes and quotas”. When we see and know personally what resources we are using up, we tend to use a lot less. Could Midd team up with HP and get a student rate on Eco friendly 2-sided personal printers, like the ones that are being offered currently at local office stores? They are even offering to pay carbon offsets to Carbonfund.org., and to recycle our old printer. Perhaps a choice could be considered and families could be offered a tuition credit for providing their own printers.

  4. Brenda Ellis

    I like the compromise idea of a quota of “free prints” for students (ie already paid for by their tuition) that is small enough that they need to really conserve it, with the option to add to their quota by purchasing more at a price that covers the true costs but isn’t a money-maker. Students can choose to bring their own printers to campus (although the environmental costs of more equipment that uses resources to manufacture and eventually has to be recycled is surely higher than using central printers). The goal should be to reduce printing to just what is necessary. Environmentally conscious, thrifty, or low income students will email articles to themselves, read more online, save things to their own computer, etc. Some entrepreneurial student will probably find a way to buy and sell extra quota some students don’t use (ie cap and trade) but the bottom line is printing will be reduced and the college will save money (resulting in smaller tuition increases). As a college student I paid to photocopy my print reserves and articles in journals (I would reduce print size to get 2 pages per side of paper, probably why I ended up needing glasses). There will be much protest at first but eventually it will be all students ever knew. Good luck with the implementation!

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