Nov
11
2009
Will college e-mail accounts get phased out?
Posted by: Juliana Brint in News, Vox Populi, tags: Colleges, Educuse, Email, Internet, Technolgy
While receiving your college e-mail address has long been a milestone for pre-frosh everywhere, a new study from Educuse suggests that college e-mail accounts may be on the way out.
Educuse’s “Core Data Service Fiscal Year 2008 Summary Report” surveyed 930 colleges and universities about their IT practices and policies and found that about 10 percent of institutions are considering eliminating school-run e-mail accounts because so many students already have outside e-mail addresses.
That figure is significant increase from the findings of the 2004 version of the survey, in which only one to two percent of schools were thinking about doing away with e-mail accounts.
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I can see Colleges phasing out the actual mail storage part of things, since it’s very easy to just forward that to someone’s “real” e-mail address. But I think having something with @georgetown.edu attached to the end of it is here to stay. It’s useful for gaining credibility and proving one’s association with the university. It’s also in the college’s best interest to provide a professional e-mail address to students so that they don’t go applying to internships with a username they picked in 4th grade.
And even if undergrads may have other e-mail accounts, and would only use this one for a few years, I think there’s a far stronger argument to be made for giving faculty an actual inbox.
My first thought while reading this: Do college and universities give students e-mail addresses because they think we don’t already have our own?? If that’s the case, then get rid of them.
But I do think an argument exists to having an institutional affiliated space on e-mail to get messages and communicate with one another beyond a personal e-mail account.
I went and looked at the survey and it’s a little unclear, but it seems like they’re talking about addresses and not accounts. Georgetown can do away with the account (i.e. server space, etc.) and nobody would care, but ANY school thinking about getting rid of their @schoolname.edu forwarding address is DUMB. The reasons for keeping it are obvious and spelled out above, and I’m no IT professional, but I can’t imagine there would be anything more than minimal upkeep and server space / bandwidth requirements.