A quick sift through the average student’s bag often yields a treasure trove of electronic gadgets.

Cell phones. Laptops. Mp3 players.

All signs of the evolving culture of the technologically savvy continually enter the University with every new freshman class.

More and more, students are entering with cell phones obtained in their hometowns, with hometown area codes. And as many student service-oriented staff are finding out, the long-distance charges are beginning to add up, especially in a University atmosphere of continual budget cuts.

Paul Cousins, director of the Office of Student Conduct, said he has seen technologically change drastically since he first began working at the University in 1990.

It was a time, he said, when phones were not only corded but had rotary dials.

“Some students here now have never used a corded phone,” Cousins said.

His department, an office he said is “call heavy” in regards to students, spends about $200 to $250 a month on long distance calls. Most of these, Cousins said, are spent on communication between Student Conduct employees and students.

“We ask students their preferred method of contact and there’s only two: Call me on my cell phone or send me an e-mail,” he said.

Although he said he could remember a time when his office wasn’t spending more than $200 every month on their phone bill, he said the “numbers have crept up each year.”

“We’re all hardwired, and there’s no such thing as free long distance at the University,” he said.

Despite the increases, Cousins said, the Office of Student Conduct isn’t “breaking the bank.”

“We’re not making decisions about whether or not to return phone calls,” Cousins said.

And the University doesn’t seem to be either.

According to Greg Sparks, director of Communication Technologies, there has only been a 1.4 percent increase in long distance usage by University administration over the period from July 2005 to January 2006, compared to the same time last year. Compare this to an actual 6.21 percent decrease in administration long distance in the fiscal year 2004-05.

Although the increased budgets for specific departments may be increasing nominally, Sparks pointed out that administrators may be examining other options for contacting students, potentially decreasing the overall costs.

“It’s forcing departments to become more aware of technology options,” Sparks said.

And the Cashier’s Office seems to be doing just that.

According to Mary O’Neill, the student account manager for the Cashier’s Office, slow days may yield six to eight long-distance phone calls, but on a “heavy day,” it’s much more than that.

But as Director Bruce Forinash pointed out, the Cashier’s Office has utilized technology to create a more efficient system that notified students by e-mail, often in an automated fashion.

“Over the last two years, the number of calls has decreased, but the number of e-mails has definitely increased,” Forinash said. “It’s more to do with leveraging technology to find ways to reduce costs and improve services.”

With the advent of the e-bill and other services the office offers to students, O’Neill and Forinash said they have seen a near extinction of the days of long lines spent waiting to pay a bill.

And although the initial cost of new technology may be significant, Forinash pointed out that transactions completed with new systems often decrease costs in the long run.

For example, a manual transaction by one of the cashiers may cost the department $3 or $4, he said. Mail transaction costs may be reduced to around 50 cents and online transactions can further be reduced to a possible 30 cents.

“It’s going to, at some point, end up balancing out,” O’Neill said.

That balancing act doesn’t stop with the University’s own changing technology.

Decreased long-distance rates have also helped relieve the financial burden. Sparks said per-minute administrative rates have decreased by about 75 percent over the past eight years — contracts in the late ’90s averaged just more than 12 cents per minute, while current rates average 3 cents per minute.

But the progression of technology hasn’t changed the dynamic of just the financial side of communication. It has affected its method as well.

Although e-mail remains a popular form of communication among many college students, University Housing Director Susan Grant said she has noticed some students have already begun to disregard e-mail.

For her department, she said, the complicated part about the changing face of communication technology is less about the financial side and more about finding a “communication system more appropriate for the time.”

“One of the challenges is and will continue to be connecting with students in the way they prefer to be connected with,” Grant said. “We have to somehow find a way to connect with students that is meaningful.”

And one of the ways becoming less and less meaningful to students is the phone service included in their dorms — a method of contact Grant said Housing employees often try first when attempting to contact students.

Sparks said only 17.6 percent of voice mailboxes offered to on-campus residents have been activated since August. Gone too are the days of revenue from the long-distance service offered to students through these phones, which dropped 45 percent last fiscal year and has already dropped another 36 percent from July 2005 to December 2005.

It’s a “continuous boom” of technology, O’Neill said, and the University has struggled to keep up.

“In some parts, technology hasn’t kept pace with student life,” Cousins said. “We’re kind of behind the curve on that.”

Grant said she thinks it’s hard for the University to keep up in some of these ways, simply because “the needs are so great.”

But as a whole, the University seems to be keeping up at least with its peer institutions, even making The Princeton Review’s list of the 25 “Most Connected Campuses” in the nation earlier this year.

Being “right on the bleeding edge,” Cousins said, is something that comes as a prerequisite to providing students with a top-grade education.

“You can’t make that argument using land lines with curly cords,” he said.

Despite the national recognition, Sparks said the University never really reaches a stopping point when it comes to technology. His job, and Comtech’s, is to continue to analyze the feasibility of applying new technology to the University medium, whether through regular meetings with the Information Technology Committee or the Teaching and Learning Technology Roundtable.

In this field, he said, people “never stop learning.”

“The challenge is on the faculty and staff to be open to new technology and find new ways to communicate with [students].” If they don’t, he said, “they’ll find it increasingly difficult to communicate to their audience.”