The quarterly DARS report might be the most important document Ohio University distributes to students. It is the blueprint for graduating on time, and it thoroughly tracks your academic career at OU. Printing it, however, is a complete waste.
Administrators are finally considering scrapping the paper version of your Degree Audit Report System form and moving entirely online. Considering the large amount of paper and money it takes to produce thousands of DARS, we cannot believe this has not already happened.
Ohio University enrolls more than 18,000 undergraduate students, and all of them are given a DARS printout, whether they want it or not. At about two pages per DARS, that totals at least 36,000 sheets of paper printed each quarter. That is a startling amount to recycle every quarter, and reducing this waste fits neatly into OU's sustainability goals.
Brice Bible, OU's chief information officer, estimated a full transition would also save $100,000 from the Office of Information Technology's annual budget. The office must cut about $950,000 from its $16.1 million budget.
Associate Registrar for DARS Bob Delong argues that the paper version is an important part of the advising process. That does not make sense. Though advising itself is important, whether or not advisers provide students a printout that gathers dust after registration does little to affect graduating on time.
Not only should OU move toward online DARS, but also, all instructors should embrace this thrifty approach to printing. There is no reason to make a copy of the syllabus for students on the first day of class when instructors could more easily post the information to Blackboard. Those syllabi would not be immediately thrown away or lost, either.
This is a simple solution that saves $100,000 and significantly cuts down paper use. With OU's budgetary problems, now is the best time to switch.
Editorials represent the majority opinion of The Post's executive editors.
4 Opinion
OU finally considers online-only DARS to relieve budget woes
