The UW’s Student Telephone Assisted Registration, better know as STAR, will be shut down permanently today at noon. Student use of the 14-year-old system drastically declined since the introduction of Web registration in spring 2000, according to Associate Registrar Van Johnson, who estimated that “maybe 5 percent” of students were still using the system.

“If there’s any problem getting through on MyUW because of server issues, sometimes I notice that STAR counts will go up a little bit,” Johnson noted.

Plans are being discussed to accommodate students without home computers, but nothing is in place for winter-quarter registration.

“I have talked to several other schools who have also discontinued their telephone-registration systems, and they had had some plans in place that were never utilized because there was no demand,” Johnson said. “There are, of course, the computer labs that are open around the clock in Odegaard.”

Prior to the introduction of STAR in 1988, students registered for classes using Mark Sense forms and standing in lines. STAR utilized 144 phone lines connected to the same database to allow students to register for classes by phone, but the cost of those phone lines, coupled with their lack of use in recent years, led to STAR’s demise.

There were 144 lines at approximately $22 per line, per month, according to Johnson. The total added up to $3,168 per month. As calls decreased over time, the number of lines was cut to 72, but even then, the UW was paying $19,008 annually for a service very few people used. Maintenance of STAR was also fairly costly, especially coupled with maintenance costs for the MyUW registration system.

“It’s less expensive, of course, to maintain one (system),” Johnson said.

Johnson will be sending out a campus-wide e-mail tomorrow to announce the closure of the system to the campus community.

“STAR was a wonderful change when we introduced it in 1988,” he said. “But now that MyUW Web registration has come along, this is really the way to go for the future.”