Among every college student’s essentials are books, pens and, of course, paper. Somehow, a building dedicated to graduates just doesn’t make the list.

Information Technology Services’ inconvenient new card-swiping system, designed to regulate the amount of paper used in the computer labs, would not be needed if NIU got its priorities straight.

If this university’s budget doesn’t have room to expand the funds it spends on paper, perhaps NIU administrators should be encouraging NIU alumni, such as Dennis Barsema, to make donations for paper – an education must – rather than $2.5 million toward an alumni center that students won’t step foot in until years down the line, when they are alumni.

Students pay about $10,000 a year to attend school here. Nowhere in the tuition bill does it state that the price of attending NIU does not include paper.

Taking preventative measures to limit the waste of paper on campus is one thing, but not allowing students to print multiple copies of a presentation handout when some professors require 50 copies – one for every student – leaves students with two options: spend money they don’t have or don’t do the assignment at all.

If the university is going to limit the students’ use of paper, professors also need to accommodate the practice.

Instead, administrators pawn the problem off on teachers, and teachers pawn it off on the students.

Passing the problem down the chain will never get it resolved, but if NIU changed the “cover sheet” system computer labs practice, we might at least be on the right track.

Every single printout a student or professor prints in a university computer lab leaves the printer with a cover sheet listing his or her Z-ID number in a font that takes up half the page.

The recycling bins in labs on campus are filled with these useless cover sheets. The first thing students do when they retrieve their printouts is take the cover sheet and toss it away – if that is not a waste, what is?

We are all educated adults in this community and can read the first few lines of a printed document to determine who it belongs to.

NIU not only could save a forest by reorganizing its priorities, but also could save a few dollars by putting effort into increasing funding available for paper and other necessities rather than constructing yet another building that will cost 100 times more than a few extra reams of paper.