On March 16, St. Edward’s University’s Office of Information Technology introduced Hoof Prints, a new printing solution designed to address many of the issues students were having with printing on campus. New printers were brought in to replace the old ones, and the new Wepa Print app meant no more logging in to lab computers or running across campus to find a printer that actually worked.

The problem is that no one knew it was happening. OIT sent out an email on March 2 explaining the new system and announcing when it would arrive. Email was the easiest way to make sure everyone received the news, but according to a survey from Bowling Green State University, 54% of students don’t always read emails from the university or academic departments.

To make matters worse, the email was sent about a week and a half before spring break. Even the students who had read the email weren’t likely to remember it amid the chaos of travel plans and parties. 

As a result, most students came back after break to a bunch of fancy new printers they had no idea how to use. Flyers were put up with basic instructions in each computer lab, but that wasn’t enough to solve the confusion.

And if they managed to puzzle the new printers out, they were greeted with a price tag. In the new system, a single monochrome page costs eight cents and a color page costs thirty five cents. Students were allotted a $10 balance each semester, and if they exceeded that balance they would have to pay out of pocket.

For many students, $10 would be plenty for an entire semester: A $10 balance can buy a student 125 monochrome pages or 28 color pages. Several majors place less focus on reading and writing, and if a student does need to do these things, they generally rely on PDFs and Ebooks — no printing required.

I find $10 to be laughably small. As a writing and rhetoric major, I’ve enrolled in multiple workshop classes throughout my college career. These classes revolve around the idea of drafting a story and printing out copies for the other students for peer reviews.

I exhausted my entire balance in one printing session because of a writing workshop. One could argue that sharing workshop drafts digitally is an easy way to prevent this, but a majority of the professors who teach these workshops require drafts to be submitted physically for one reason or another. Professors should not be required to alter their teaching style in order to avoid charging their students, and students who prefer physical copies should not be pressured to go digital.

There’s a lot to like with Hoof Prints, and I genuinely believe that under different circumstances I would have welcomed its arrival. Knowing a printer is working before I walk across campus to find it is very nice, and printing from the app is so much faster than logging in to a lab computer. But if I had known the price of those luxuries, I would have kept the excuse to get some exercise.