Printing costs at the university will be raised starting July 1, since very few people printed documents over the past year, due to the pandemic.
Soon, a one-sided, black and white, A4 print will cost 3.5 cents instead of 3.2. Colour prints will go from 6.7 cents to 7.3 cents each.
The university published the new pricing last week, announcing that the changes were made because fewer people made use of the printing services over the past year due to the corona pandemic.
Fixed and flexible costs
UG spokesperson Anja Hulshof explains that the price increase has to do with the fixed costs for each individual printing job. ‘The price consists of fixed and flexible costs. The fixed prices are taken into account when determining the price of a printing job.’
This means that if no one is printing, the university doesn’t earn any money to pay the fixed costs with. ‘Now that the number of printing jobs has decreased drastically due to the pandemic, paying those fixed costs is a problem’, says Hulshof.
Burden
Is it fair to burden students with the costs of the pandemic when they’ve already had such a hard year?
Hulshof says the prices are re-evaluated in June every year. ‘We’ve had no reason to change them over the past three years, so we didn’t.’
In spite of the current price hike, Hulshof says the university is still at the lower end of the market when it comes to printing prices. ‘It’s still a good price for printing, and we’d like to keep it that way.’