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.
Michael Becker has been blogging about academia, digital culture and journalism since 2005. He is the Web editor of the
2 Comments
I wonder what percent of students at MSU use the ‘public labs’ here. One of the IT guys I work with said he wishes that MSU would do this because often times they get ‘hand me downs’ that are often more work to maintain. But if you don’t have those labs or any issues, what kind of need for support would there be?
It would be awfully complicated for MSU to eliminate all of its public labs, considering that most of them are operated and funded by Residence Life and ResNet, not the ITC. But I also have to wonder just how many students actually use them these days — for more than anything except printing, that is.