Knowing that Gmail, AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, and so many other websites offer free E-mail accounts, the University of Nevada has cut its free E-mail service for students. The service, which lasted some 20 years, gave students E-mail addresses through the school's database.
Infrequency of use and the need to cut costs made the decision to close the service rather easy for the school, the Nevada Sagebrush reports. "Best we can tell, only about 20 percent of existing [university] E-mail accounts assigned are used," Steven Zink, the university's vice president of information and technology, tells the Sagebrush.
An article by the Chronicle of Higher Education cited by the Sagebrush reported in 2008 that more than 1,000 schools have changed or converted their school-based E-mail systems.
"For me, I don't mind either way," one student tells the Sagebrush. "If it saves money, keeps classes and teachers from being cut, and prevents tuition from rising, then by all means cut the student E-mails."
The system will be axed by the fall semester of the 2010 school year.
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Reader Comments
Drop e-mail
The article is unclear about what students will use now. At Temple University in Philadelphia, like many others, we partnered with Google to provide e-mail for students, faculty, and alumni. You can't simply abandon a unifying e-mail standard ... you'd have an academic wild-West all over again .... oh, that's right, it is Nevada :)
Pro - Drop email service to students
Now that email is generally free to everyone, most students come to campus with their own accounts and likely they will use those accounts after graduation.
1. It would provide significant savings
2. It would allow for easy communication after graduation (alumni associations struggle with this issue)
3. The free offerings are far superior to the college offerings.
4. It may not provide any direct savings to students but it would free up resources that could be used to develop new solutions, tools for students.
5. Ultimately there is no longer any measurable benefit in providing this service to students
