When Abby Eller and her staff were trying to find ways to cut their budget by 5 percent in January, "We realized the biggest thing we do was mail and print," said Eller, director of Cornell's Summer College Programs for High School Students.

Not any more.

As of January, the Summer College's recruitment, admissions and registration have gone "paperless" whenever possible. Formal decision letters, tuition statements, instructors' welcome letters, student handbooks, permission forms and information packets for parents and accepted students are now e-mailed or posted online rather than printed and mailed. The school's 1,400 applicants can submit recommendation letters online and get $10 off the $65 application fee if they apply online, said associate director Janna Bugliosi, MILR '07. "We wanted to keep our quality high at the same time. So far no one we had been mailing to has objected at all."

Summer College, which is part of Cornell's School of Continuing Education and Summer Sessions, is just one of many campus units slashing its paper use. The College of Agriculture and Life Sciences' CALS News magazine, for example, is encouraging its 50,000 subscribers to visit its online version, at http://calsnews.cornell.edu. For each reader who opts out of a print subscription, the magazine can save 70 cents on printing and postage costs, or $7,000 per 10,000 subscribers, according to Linda McCandless, CALS' director of communications. And Undergraduate Admissions will no longer offer a print version of its freshman application online; instead applicants can download a PDF form online.

The Summer College's paperless push began well before President David Skorton announced Jan. 25 an across-the-board 5 percent budget cut, said Glenn Altschuler, dean of the School of Continuing Education and Summer Sessions. Rather, it is part of the school's longstanding efforts to reach potential students -- who range from teenagers to octogenarians and live all over the world -- most effectively, said Altschuler. "We have to be pretty nimble to reach them all."

Instead of spending hours opening and sending mail, Summer College staff can now spend more time with applicants via e-mail or phone, Eller says. "These [applicants] are young students, they're not used to the application process," she said. "We try to be as personal with them as we can be."

Meanwhile, Cornell's Adult University (CAU), which is also part of the school, has become more aggressive in collecting e-mail addresses for its participants, Altschuler said. CAU is also beefing up its Web site's multimedia elements, such as video showing trip highlights in ways that a brochure simply can't, he said. "This initiative is definitely a worthwhile undertaking for its own sake. That it may well reduce our expenditures is a splendid added attraction."

So far, it has. Catherine Penner '68, CAU's director, plans to reduce the size and weight of the CAU catalog, which is sent twice a year to up to 60,000 addresses. Summer College will save approximately $50,000 this year by paring down its 20-page catalog, and reducing additional printing and mailing costs, Eller said.

Yet, Summer College staff members still print and mail transcripts and print each applicant's documents and file them in manila folders for review. Eller eventually wants to make it possible to read all those documents online, as the College of Arts and Sciences and other colleges have done, she said. "That would be the next big savings."