Students may be in for a surprise when they print at the Mary Couts Burnett Library this semester.

According to an email sent by the TCU Information Technology Center Tuesday morning, the number of free prints allowed to students has dropped from 200 to 150 black and white pages per semester.

The decision was made in order to lower the price of print jobs and make the printing program more sustainable, according to the email.

According to an analysis from Information Technology Center, the average student prints 329 pages per year, Chief Technology Officer Bryan Lucas said.

“The reality is that the [free print] program is losing money,” Lucas said.  “We lost about $17,000 last year on printing pages.  About 71 percent of all pages printed last year were free, and that number was a huge increase from two years ago.  The decision was to either lose more money or cut off the prints, and we felt that lowering the prints was the fairest way to handle that.”

Junior nursing major Gladys Bowen was upset with the announcement.

 “It’s not fair,” Bowen said.  “I’m in the nursing program and I have clinicals.  I have to print off all these papers for each individual patient; it’s not just for one class. Just the clinical papers alone fill up one entire binder.  I go through these prints in about a week.”

Others said the decision did not affect them.

“It really doesn’t affect me that much, because I just print off half my stuff at home and half at the library,” said Junior computer information technology major Landon Westrom.

TCU student body president Brent Folan did not like the news, either.

Folan, a senior finance major, said that one of his campaign goals when he ran for office last year was to increase the number of free prints available to students.

“I felt like two hundred wasn’t enough,” Folan said.  “I met with Bryan Lucas last semester to try and get the number of prints increased, and I heard nothing about this change.  I was just as shocked as everyone else when I read the email.”

Folan said he will meet with Lucas on Friday to discuss the possibility of increasing the amount of free prints in the future.

Lucas said that raising the amount of free prints for students was “still an option,” but that for right now, “we’re just trying to budget for a new year.”

The headline was corrected to show which department changed the number of free prints.