Criticizing and critiquing Hamline is a pastime that will never grow old, no matter how much I admire her. The latest issue that’s been slowly bubbling to the surface? Printing fees. I’ve gone through trying to print my own stuff at home and am currently in need of color ink even though I only need to print black and white. I never imagined that other colleges and universities might cover student printing charges. It sounded like a fairytale. I’m glad this is my last semester and I will soon no longer be indebted to Hamline for a late $0.80 printing charge.

I’m a double major, and while I haven’t ever had to print copies of an essay for my entire class, I’ve been annoyed by printing charges. For my Digital Media Arts (DMA) major, having to do test-prints in color or just selecting the wrong front-to-back version for an infographic can cause frustrating printing charges that fall on the student. Even with our senior project for DMA, we aren’t guaranteed the department will cover all of our printing charges associated with the creation and installation of our finished project.

Senior Tijqua Daiker also has run into costly printing charges through courses. Daiker argued that Hamline should definitely cover printing fees. Daiker talked about being in fiction classes where “Fiction majors got it rough” because their professors don’t use Google Docs, resulting in printing out multiple 15+ page stories a semester. Oh, and those stories need to be printed around 20 times so each person in the class has a copy. Daiker also mentioned how the printers are set up to print in color even if the document is black and white, so forgetting to change your black and white story into color to print about 400 pages for one assignment is a costly nightmare.

Like I fantasized about earlier, other institutions actually cover some or all of your printing charges. I heard from two transfer students about their different printing experiences.

Adeliah Mulli is a junior transfer student from MCTC. Mulli shared that “all students got a few hundred dollars of credit towards printing.” I can’t even imagine having been given that much in printing credit from Hamline! Mulli further explained that, “Before coming to Hamline, it was always acceptable to bring an electronic version of a document to class.” Sometimes I’ve had professors willing to budge on this, but often, I’ve had to bring a hard copy. I’m currently taking  Biology of Human Function and just had to print out an assignment that could have easily been done through Blackboard so that I didn’t have to pay money to print it out.

Sophomore Janie Schwartz also cited having to print out multiple copies for a course. In her Introduction to Professional Writing course, she had to print 22 copies of an essay. I find this just as ridiculous as Tijqua’s printing experiences. Janie concluded by saying, “ I think Hamline in general needs a better money management system.”

Printing doesn’t just affect students in courses. Alisha Bowen is a senior and the leader of a student organization. Bowen mentioned that Hamline doesn’t give any discounts for student orgs. I’m also the leader of an org, Canvas Magazine, and we don’t even have a printing budget for anything besides the printing of our magazine. Any org-related printing charges have always fallen to the Editor in Chief to pay out of pocket for.

Getting back to the idea of a better money management system, I’ve frequently heard murmurs from professors and fellow students that Hamline is in a deficit. Even though we pay a lot to go here, Hamline hasn’t always been so wise with its money. Looking back a few years, a 2015 issue of The Oracle reported that “Hanson is the 2nd-highest paid private college president in the state of Minnesota, receiving a salary higher than that of the President of the United States,” which I’ve held onto during my time here. I think it’s absurd that she was paid so much. However, I think this gets at a larger issue with our perceptions of college.

As much as we might like to ignore it, college is a business and businesses have to find ways to stay afloat. I think for Hamline, the idea of actually being able to afford printing credits or free printing for students might be hard to grasp. While of course I’d love to not have to worry about printing credits or getting a hold on my account because of a miniscule printing charge, I don’t know how possible it is for Hamline. Maybe in the years to come, if retention stays high and enrollment grows. Hamline is a business like anything else, and they have to find ways to make money, as counter-intuitive as it might seem at times to students.