If you or a family member are going to the Chicago-Kent College of Law or Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management this fall, don’t forget to bring a PC; like textbooks and tuition, it’s mandatory.
Same goes for students entering law and graduate engineering programs at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
And if your son or daughter will be an undergraduate at U. of I., University of Notre Dame or the other Chicago-area campuses that don’t yet require PC ownership, it’s best to get one anyway.
Henry H. Perritt Jr., dean of Chicago-Kent, says his school’s computer requirement follows a trend that began in 1992, after his new building at 565 W. Adams St. opened with power cords and network connections near every seat in every classroom.
The next step was a voluntary “E-Learn” program, which attracted about 100 incoming students in its first year. “Instead of books they have all their course materials in electronic form, and they have software that allows them to annotate materials and link them,” with notes from major online libraries such as Westlaw, Perritt said.
By the 1997-98 school year, only 6 percent of the school’s 375 new students didn’t own computers, so the school’s decision to mandate them wasn’t a hardship for most of them. Perritt prefers they get notebook computers, and the school recommends Pentium-based machines with at least 32 megabytes of RAM, 1 gigabyte hard drive, CD-ROM and a PCMCIA card that combines an Ethernet network adapter and a modem.
“We are completely committed to the Internet and Web, so registration information is on there, and they can pay deposits and even tuition through the Web,” said Perritt, who last spring taught a course for the upper classes with no paper materials whatsoever.
Lawyers in the 21st Century will have to know computers to practice, he said. “This is what will be at the heart of the way people practice law. Law firms now regularly use e-mail and have Internet access. Many judges take discovery in electronic formats. To be effective you’ve got to be comfortable with this stuff. So we cut them less slack than we used to when it was novel.”
What has happened at Chicago-Kent and other graduate programs is part of a national trend that’s also impacting undergraduate education. Market Data Retrieval, a Shelton, Conn.-based market research company, estimates 94 percent of students at Illinois colleges had Internet access last year, and 92 percent had access to local area networks. Both figures are slightly higher than national averages.
Mike Subrizi, director of college product development at MDR, notes that colleges are expanding their local networks, connecting them to the Internet and bringing access into dorms and classrooms.
“They’re building infrastructure,” he said, with equal amounts of money allocated to administrative and academic computing. Colleges are “creating content, building programs and providing connectivity,” encouraging computer purchases by students but avoiding requirements.
Why ? Larry Rapagnani, assistant provost for information technologies at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Ind., says it’s a question of cost.
“Once you make a computer requirement, there’s a financial-aid implication,” he said. “You have to add that to the financial-aid package,” which can add $750 per year to the bill.
“As much as we’d like to mandate them, we’re aware of the financial burden it puts on our students,” Rapagnani said. “We’d like to make access ubiquitous instead, and we’re accomplishing that.”
Roughly 6,900 Notre Dame students, or about 88 percent, live in residence halls, and 3,720 of them have computers. There are another 800 machines available for students on-campus.
Notre Dame’s back-to-school brochures this year don’t specify brands but recommend that students buy 250 MHz machines with 64 MB RAM, 2- to 4-gig hard drives and Ethernet adapters. The school has a “solutions center,” formerly called a computer store, which sells the machines.
The 6-year-old center sells support contracts as well as PCs. “We try to provide 3- to 4-year warrantees to cover the lifetime use of the PC,” Rapagnani said.
Ray Austensen, provost of Valparaiso University in Valparaiso, Ind., reflects the ambivalence many administrators feel over computer requirements.
Valparaiso University leaves the question of requiring computers up to its colleges, and three years ago the College of Engineering launched such a requirement. “About 65 percent of the incoming students actually buy computers under this program,” Austensen said. “The other 35 percent have them” already.
The engineers almost invariably buy desktop computers rather than laptops, Austensen said. “They’re more powerful for the money, and engineers want power.”
The decision also may be influenced by the fact that the school hasn’t yet wired its classrooms, although it has wired all its dorm rooms. “Students can plug in and not only get access to the on-campus intranet but the entire Internet,” Austensen said.
Valparaiso’s academic computing advisory committee considered the question of mandating computer ownership in a June 1997 report. “The conclusion was this was not something we need to do,” Austensen said, “but it needs to be looked at on a program by program basis, so it’s clearly connected with the learning process and isn’t burdening the parents with added costs.”
The reluctance is driven by a desire to hold down tuition costs, he said. “We’re still a best buy,” in an annual survey by U.S. News & World Report, “and one of the top Midwestern institutions” in providing value for money.
“That’s one of the major issues across higher education — the nexus of value and cost,” Austensen said. “Are colleges just adding cost without adding value ?”
Ed Krol has a unique view of the growing debate. He’s assistant director of the computer center at U of I. He’s also author of “The Whole Internet User’s Guide” (O’Reilly & Associates, 1994), an early guide to the Web that sold over 500,000 copies.
“It’s an interesting issue,” Krol said. “If they’re recommended, they’re not included in the basic price of college education used to calculate financial need, but if they’re required they are. Some kids may be better off if we required it–scholarships and financial aid would take it into account. But that’s not been done yet,” Krol said.
As a result, the U. of I. computer labs are run “as though a student doesn’t need his or her own computer, but it turns out about 44 percent of the general student population comes with some kind of machine, and 80 percent of engineers do.”
George Badger, associate vice chancellor for computing and communications at U. of I., said the question of requiring laptops on-campus now comes up every year.
“We haven’t made it at the general undergraduate level because of the cost impact on the students,” Badger said. “We’ve followed a strategy of encouraging people to buy them, then complementing it with a lot of machines owned by the campus.
“We have between 3,000 and 4,000 machines on campus,” in libraries and student lounges, while “about half our students own a machine.” With about 26,000 undergraduates, and 10,000 graduate and professional students, that means students have about 20,000 ways to reach the campus network.
Gregory A. Jackson, associate provost for information technology at the University of Chicago at 5801 S. Ellis Ave., said U. of C. doesn’t demand universal computer ownership, preferring the goal of universal student access to the network. In addition to a student ownership of PCs in dorm rooms, there are clusters of desktop PCs in the dorms, and more clusters in libraries and other locations around campus.
Instead of selling computers, U of C offers all students a free “connectivity pack,” a CD with Web access software. “The longest registration line here is for the connectivity pack,” Jackson said. “Between 67 and 75 percent of our undergraduates have them, but 90 percent of undergraduates are in a dorm room with a PC.”
Jackson said access is becoming standard at research universities. “They all Ethernet the dorms, they all provide e-mail and connectivity software; there’s a batch of stuff.”
The advantage of a computer mandate, he said, is that it creates a “homogenous environment,” with tangible benefits. Professors can know students have access to the same software and can assign homework dependent on it. The per-student costs of supporting on-campus PCs also declines with a mandate.
But Dartmouth University in Hanover, N.H., which still ranks as the “most-networked” university campus in the annual survey of campus computing by Yahoo! Internet Life magazine, also can be an object lesson in what’s wrong with a mandate, Jackson said.
“Dartmouth was early in this with a Macintosh requirement. That worked for a while, but then PC students came, and that has interfered with their ability to deliver” on the advantages the requirement offers, Jackson said.
“The saving grace is the Web,” Jackson said. “You can’t deal with an old client using the Web,” but most non-obsolete computers can handle the Web’s Hypertext Transfer Protocol and run a browser.
At Northwestern University in Evanston, the J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management began mandating laptops last year. Associate Dean for Finance and Technology Catherine Grimsted said the program started with 133 MHz IBM ThinkPads.
This year incoming students will buy 233 MHz or 266 MHz Dell Latitude notebooks for about the same price, $2,200. The Kellogg machines include all the software students will need and come with support contracts. “We support all hardware and software as though they were corporate employees of Kellogg,” Grimsted said. The program has been very helpful, she added. “Our students work in groups of three to five students in each class. For each of them to be productive, they need laptops.”
Even where a specific computer isn’t mandated on the Evanston campus, ownership of a PC is very strongly encouraged, said Mort Rahimi, a university vice president.
“In the McCormick School of Engineering, they don’t require it, but the brochure indicates you’d better have access to one,” he said. “The Medill School of Journalism requires all entering students to own some computer, both in the graduate and undergraduate programs.”
Specific requirements differ markedly among the colleges, however. Medical students need computers with 17-inch monitors for viewing complex images. Journalism students need Macintosh computers for graphics work, and the Music School requires a MIDI interface to a piano keyboard.
To deal with these needs, Northwestern has put together a virtual computer store, a password-protected area on the school’s Web site, Rahimi said.
“We handle all the Web infrastructure, but depending on what you’re buying, you could go to a specific vendor,” and buy at a site thousands of miles away.
If you’re buying a Dell PC, you’ll be linked to a Dell “premier page” in Austin, Texas. This is a special section of that company’s site, where discounts negotiated between Dell and Northwestern apply.
In addition to wiring the dorms and libraries, and putting “clusters” in other buildings, Northwestern has also built “smart classrooms” in many of its colleges. There are now 35 of these classrooms, which have extra PCs and large display screens for demonstrating lessons.
Rahimi estimates 85 percent of Northwestern’s undergraduates and 65 percent of graduate students will come to school with a computer this year. “It is not a undergraduate versus graduate split, it’s an age thing,” he said. “Our freshmen own more computers than our seniors.”
“Every class we bring in becomes less fearful of the technology,” said Notre Dame’s Rapagnani. “Our freshman class for 1999 was born when the first IBM PC came along, in 1982. They just view it as a tool,” like the telephone.
No one wants to go back to the days of college life before telephones, Rapagnani said. In a few years, the same will be said of PCs and the Internet.
NO EASY ANSWERS
Because computer-based learning is a relatively new phenomenon that threatens some of the traditional tenets of higher education, it has become one of the most controversial topics on U.S. campuses.
The accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers recently held a seminar on computers and education from which Jill Kidwell, partner in charge of the firm’s higher-education practice, produced a white paper last May.
“You’re seeing people on all sides of a continuum arguing,” Kidwell said. “Extremists on one side say brick and mortar will go away, those on the other that learning requires face-to-face contact.”
Both sides are wrong, she said. “There will be multiple answers for multiple markets.”
For workers who want to change careers, “giving them something over the Internet may be perfectly adequate,” said Steven Gilbert, president of the TLT Group, the non-profit technology-research arm of the American Association of Higher Education in Washington, D.C.
“On the other hand, there’s still a big cohort of adolescents and post-adolescents who want to be motivated and guided, and a big cohort of retirees who want to be intellectually engaged,” Gilbert said. For them, “putting something on the Internet is no better than telling them they should get a good book.”
Market Data Retrieval, a Shelton, Conn.-based market research firm, estimates colleges with more than 25,000 students spent $238 per student on technology last year. Schools with fewer than 2,500 students spent even more, $358 per student.
The result of all this spending is that most major campuses today have 10 megabit per second Internet connections in dorm rooms, libraries and classrooms, said Mike Subrizi, director of college product development at MDR.
Of 2,314 schools that responded to MDR’s most recent technology survey, only 216 said they weren’t networked.
So if you haven’t been on a college campus in the last decade, you’re in for a shock, said Tim McDonough, director of public affairs for the American Council on Education in Washington, D.C.
“Technology is changing universities,” McDonough said. “Libraries, labs and classrooms are being changed dramatically.”
But it hasn’t changed everywhere. “Compare rural community colleges with large research universities–access is very different, and it has dramatic implications for the kind of education that’s possible,” Gilbert said.
That’s not true in all cases. Helen Chaffee is president of both Mayville State University and Valley City State University, two small North Dakota schools 75 miles apart. Both mandate laptop computer ownership by students.
Chaffee said there’s a difference between requiring students to own computers and actually using them in class. The latter becomes possible only when there’s a single platform, she said, and when teachers as well as students use that platform.
Of course not everyone is sold that this new dependence on networks and computers is a good thing. Almost 900 professors at the University of Washington signed a letter in June protesting a plan to take some classes on-line. In Canada, professors at York University in Toronto went on strike and won the right to keep courses off-line last year.
McDonough is sympathetic to those concerns. “Technology isn’t the answer for everything. It’s also not clear technology is a cost-saver over the long run,” he said.
But the market is sending a different message. The for-profit University of Phoenix, which has no traditional campus and relies heavily on technology, “is rapidly expanding, it’s accredited, and it offers the basics of a B.A. in many states,” McDonough said.
Phil Atwood, manager of PC strategy and programs for IBM Education-North America in Atlanta, said 60 institutions will be part of his company’s ThinkPad University program this year, which requires both students and teachers to own a specific laptop.
And some very large schools, including University of Virginia, Virginia Tech and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are expected to create a mandate in 1999, Atwood said.
“A lot of these people are still sorting out how to get there,” he said. But the days of laptop requirements are approaching on more and more campuses.
THE WAKE FOREST MODEL
If you want to know how Chicago’s college students will live five years from now, visit Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C.
Wake, a private school with 3,650 undergraduates, decided to make notebook computer ownership mandatory two years ago as part of its “Plan for the Class of 2000.”
Business major Amanda Epstein of Coral Springs, Fla., is a member of that class. When she arrived on campus in the fall of 1996, she was issued a new IBM ThinkPad notebook computer by the school. When she returns to campus this month, she’ll be issued a new one that’s hers to keep upon graduation. Whether she’s in the library, a classroom or her dorm room, she’s never more than a few feet from a power cord and an Ethernet connector.
“I took typing in high school and I’ve used a computer since I was 5. In high school I learned it for real,” she recalled. When she looked at colleges, “we were always interested in what kind of networking they had.”
She hasn’t been disappointed at Wake Forest. “You’ll still mostly see people on campus carrying books,” she said, but the ThinkPads are a common sight in the library. “I’ve had some lessons that were PowerPoint presentations,” which allowed the instructor and students to focus less on note-taking and more on the lesson itself.
“They know that technology, no matter how good, will never replace the teacher,” Epstein said. “I’ve had very positive experiences with teachers who are into technology, and who responded to e-mails” faster than to phone calls.
The WFU commitment followed five years of planning, said Vice President for Finance and Administration John P. Anderson.
“It was agreed that every freshman would take a seminar with 17 students and a full professor,” Anderson said. The course is designed to introduce both students and teachers to the regular use of notebook computers and networks.
If Anderson’s impressions are an indication, the plan is working.
“I taught problem solving across the disciplines, how engineers solve problems differently from lawyers, etc.,” he said. It was an eye opener. “We were able to go much faster and classes were more intense because we had interaction on the class Web site. Students did more advanced topics. Just about everything improved.”
Jay Dominick, assistant vice president for information systems, implemented the plan. Before Epstein’s class reached campus, “we had to provide a network that extended to all the residence halls, with multiple connections to faculty offices, connections in lounges, study spaces, everywhere.” The backbone networks now run at 622 megabits per second, with 10 Mbps connections to every desk and dorm room.
Standards were a key to keeping costs down, Dominick said. By requiring a specific IBM ThinkPad, students could be enlisted as low-cost support teams. Student Technology Advisors like Epstein, who used her experience to help land an internship with Chicago consulting firm Bricker & Associates this summer, get a slight discount on tuition and are on call in the dorms to answer questions and handle basic repairs.
The standards extend to software packages such as Microsoft Office 97, for which the school purchased site licenses. This not only allows the information systems department to update students’ laptops automatically from university servers, but also assures instructors of a common platform so they can demand homework in specific formats.
