Last year, Ball State spent $78,000 on approximately 120,000 rolls of toilet paper for residence halls alone.
College is tough and sometimes students have to go to great lengths in order to get some basic necessities — like toilet paper.
Some students are stealing toilet paper from campus facilities to take back to their off-campus homes.
Wondering where the best toilet paper on campus is? See what our columnist decided.
Even being an RA didn't deter one person. Amber Umila, a junior hospitality and food management major, would steal toilet paper to help her friends.
“A couple times when I lived in the residence hall as an RA and my friends were balling on a budget, I had to hook them up," Umila said. “Sometimes you've got to do what you've got to do."
Although she took the toilet paper, Umila said she doesn’t necessarily agree that it is the university’s responsibility to provide toilet paper for all of its students.
“It's not one of those things that they should give, but sometimes we will be out of toilet paper on Thursday and payday isn’t until Friday,” she said. “I think it would be great if they would give it to the Cardinal Kitchen for students to pick up.”
Cardinal Kitchen is a food pantry for Ball State students that works to give students food if they're having a hard time paying for it. The pantry is run completely on donations and currently only shelves food.
Amie Cipolla, a senior residential property management and interior design major, said she was able to justify taking it because of high tuition costs.
“I kind of made it OK in my head because when you live in the dorms, it costs thousands of dollars. And the toilet paper you get is the cheapest quality,” she said. “I don’t know what the money goes to. We pay six to eight thousand — that money isn’t the money that should be going to renovations. The amount of money that each person pays is too much.”
Cipolla said she isn’t the only one she knows who takes toilet paper.
“I had a friend who took it from Applied Technology Building," she said. "They had to use bobby pins to to unlock the toilet paper so they could get it out because they are the bigger rolls.”
However, the university said they aren't aware of it. When asked about it, George Edwards, associate director of facilities, said the university is not experiencing a problem with people stealing toilet paper.
Last year, Ball State spent $78,000 on approximately 120,000 rolls of toilet paper for residence halls alone, Edwards said.
For junior nursing major Emilie Van Velse, it was just a matter of convenience.
“In the dorms I lived in, there were always just stacks of toilet paper in the bathrooms since they were only cleaned once a week," she said. "It was never all used, so it just sat there.”
So she took it, and she said her friends would often be amused by her antics.
“It kind of just turned into a joke with our friends," she said. "One time we were going to a friend’s house and she told us she was out, so we brought her some that was just sitting in our bathroom. They thought it was so funny that we would bring toilet paper sometimes when we came over.”
Unlike Umila and Cipolla, Van Velse said she thinks Ball State should provide toilet paper to its students.
“Toilet paper is a basic product used in everyday life, and it can get expensive," she said. "I feel like it could be something made available for people who really need it."
Not everyone is in the same financial situation, and some have it harder than others, she said.
"People may think it sounds ridiculous to take the toilet paper, but it was helpful sometimes when friends couldn’t get to the store or didn’t get paid for a few more days," she said.
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