University of Virginia shutting down public computer labs to save money

The University of Virginia is plan­ning to shut down its pub­lic com­puter labs to save money, the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus blog reports.

An expla­na­tion on the university’s Web site.More from the CHE here.

Basically, a sur­vey last fall showed that 99 per­cent of stu­dents bring their own com­put­ers. And though stu­dents spent over 650,000 hours in the campus’s labs last year, most of that time was for text edit­ing and Web brows­ing — stuff you can do on any computer.

This news really takes me back to my early col­lege days. Back then, it was just becom­ing nor­mal for every­body to bring a com­puter with them, and the uni­ver­sity had only installed Ethernet ports in all dorm rooms the year before I arrived. Before then, you con­nected to the cam­pus net­work via the tele­phone jack — the old-fashioned way.

I used the com­puter labs, but that was mainly when I needed to get away from my girl­friend at the time and because I wanted to use a Mac — there’s still a lab just full of Macs on our cam­pus. At least, I think there is.

At any rate, the days of pub­lic com­puter labs are com­ing to and end. I just hope that lots of peo­ple get some good deals on all the com­put­ers uni­ver­si­ties are going to try to get rid of pretty soon.

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3. Academic Freedom
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5. University Salaries