Reading the article, it looked like some money would be set aside for purchasing them, and it also mentioned “vouchers” for low income students. So, would other “non-low” income student have to fork over the whole enchilada I wonder? Whats another couple Grand in the big scheme, hey?
Post secondary is getting more and more expensive every year…
As someone who works in the student financial aid industry I can tell you that currently your financial aid has a clause where you can take out X amount more dollar in your freshman year for the purchase of a laptop. You can get a working laptop that will be able to do almost everything you need for about $1500-2000 that should last you for 4-5 years in college. There is talk coming from the Secratary of Education and The Chief Operating Officer of Student Financial Aid that the laptop clause will be renewable every two years. So you know, every US citizen has access to financial aid, it just isn’t necessarily free aid. This doesn’t take into consideration the few instances where a US citizen has had his/her eligibility revoked such as being a convicted drug felon where the judge opted for the restriction of financial aid (it can happen but most judges don’t put that one into their sentances), you renigged on your student loans twice (officially it is once but you can get some waivers that will allow it to be twice), or you went over the federal loan aggregate limit for your lifetime which is currently set at $117,000 in student loans of anytype (this does not include privately funded loans such as those a bank would make you).
Sqrl: Grrrrrr… nevermind, not your fault, unless you’re the Undersecretary For Screwing Everything Up For Black455.
Re the laptops, there was a big article on this in the Chronicle of Higher Education awhile ago… I’ll have to wait till I get to work to post it cuz the online archives are subscription only, IIRC.
When I was an aspiring journalism student nearly 30 years ago, we were required to have a portable tape recorder – not just any tape recorder, but a “broadcast quality” tape recorder that was about four times as expensive as an ordinary model from Radio Shack.
A few years later the engineering and math majors were required to go out and buy a hideously expensive device called a “pocket calculator” which could easily run more than a semester’s tuition for a public college.
Not to mention the cost of books.
At least with a laptop you have something you can use in real life.
My wife knows the Ripoff That IS Required Laptops firsthand; her program requires her to buy a laptop FROM THE COLLEGE.
Here’s the kicker; she can’t really buy it, just rent it. It’s rented to her for $800 per semester. She cannot keep it over Christmas holidays or during the summer. If it’s lost or broken she pays the full replacement price, which they list as being $3500. She must rent it or its successors for six semesters in total. Buying your own is not an option.
I just started med school in August and we were required to purchase a laptop. We are the first class to do so, and as such have been subject to experimentation with the curriculum. Theoretically, all of our lectures, etc are to be on PowerPoint so that we don’t have to use pencil and paper anymore.
The other nice thing is that we all have wireless LAN cards. The entire campus is wired for the network, so we can wander the halls with our laptops and not lose internet connection.
I am at Stanford, and have some friends in the Law School where a laptop is “required”.
What I was told by one of them is that it is not hard to live without one. The reason it is required is that if it is a mandatory expense (like books for classes) it is tax deductible. (I think of the prison guard in “Shawshank Redemption” who had to purchase his own gun, and could deduct it as a business expense).
I’ve never bothered to itemize my deductions, since I don’t earn that much. But some of the law students can earn a nice packet working for firms over the summer, and so could benefit from itemizing and deducting a laptop.
I won’t know until you post the article, but maybe it’s the article I was quoted (or at least mentioned) in. Here it is, if it’s the one you’re thinking of.
Back in 98, I and some colleagues spent the better part of a year trying to fight the proposed laptop requirement at UNC-Chapel Hill (which went into effect this semester, btw). While ultimately we were unsuccessful, I have good word from a friend in the IT department that our movement did in fact bring to light some issues which otherwise might have been left unthought of.
While I decide whether to start my standard diatribe on this subject here, some reading material: http://www.unc.edu/campus/sigs/compfree/
A good bit out of date, and perhaps a bit too reactionary in some places, but generally outlines the problems we had with UNC’s program.
(I should mention about that Chronicle article, though, they characterized us as a group of Mac fans. While that’s true of myself, but not of the whole group!)
I attend a school with required laptops (RPI.) They make us purchase or lease the laptops form them, or we can buy ones on are own that meet their standards.
The general concensus (spelled wrong?) of the student population is that it’s a bad idea. The faculty loves it (they actually don’t make money off of it,) I don’t know why.
The only thing we use them for in class is to use two programs. Maple math and graphing program, and SolidWorks 2000, a CAD program. That’s it. Ans it seems they teach us Maple only to find an excuse for the laptops. Damn.
Some more points about laptops at UNC (read drewbert’s excellent link first):
These students are not, for the most part rich; the laptop is a significant expense for them. Also, most of them can’t afford tuition at an out-of-state or private college, and therefore don’t have the option of attending a school with a comparable reputation that doesn’t require laptops.
Despite the university’s efforts to cram instructional technology down our throats, most profs and TAs in the humanities don’t use the laptops at all in our classes. Why should we, when we can teach the material just as effectively without them? Several of my colleagues in the English department don’t allow laptops in their classrooms at all, on the grounds that they’re distracting. I haven’t banned them in my comp class, but I can’t think of anything useful to do with them either – the class revolves around discussion and group work, and laptops tend to create a barrier between the people using them and the rest of the class.
I think students should have the option of sharing computers with their roommates or friends – surely they’re not going to need the computer 24 hours a day, and it seems like an eminently sensible way to keep costs low. As far as I know, they’re not allowed to do this at all under the current system.
Before I started med school two years ago, I got a letter telling me all about a “required” laptop that I had to buy. I wasn’t happy about this, for two reasons–it was an overpriced, outdated model, and I had just dropped two grand on my Gateway desktop.
I e-mailed a friend who had started a year ahead of me, who said that the school did have noble intentions for integrating the laptops into the curriculum, but most of them were unrealized. She strongly encouraged me to, at the very least, buy a different laptop.
Two years later, as everyone else is poking along on their little Pentium laptops and I’m zooming by them with the P2-300, I’m happy.
[hijack]Does it smell like Gross Anatomy in here? Oh, it’s USCDiver! Welcome to the club. If you need moral support from a third-year, look me up.[/hijack]
Interesting point, Bouv. I work at Siena’s I&TS department, and was wondering about the usefulness of computers. Unless people are touch typists, it’s a pretty awkward way to take notes.
I can manage 80 wpm typing (if I really try hard), and I’d still find it awkward to take notes with a keyboard. When I take notes, I’m always circling things or drawing arrows to connect important points, etc. And what if I’m in a math or physics class? What do they expect me to do, fire up a graphics program to make that picture of the frictionless object sliding down the inclined plane?
I understand the argument about how in the past people bought expensive pocket calculators for schoolwork, etc. That kind of purchase was justified because there was a very specific application for their use. What gets up my butt is the dreamy assertion by university officials that “computers make everything bettteeerrrrr…” without having given a single moments’ thought to how the things will actually be used - what specific uses of these computers are so universally important that every student suddenly must have one?
I wanted to know how someone was going to conduct a class in a lecture hall with 300 students clackity-clacking away on their keyboards while a few of them crash or run low on batteries on a daily basis. The only answers we got were “Look, it can play movies on DVD! And you can take all your homework with you to the beach! And you’re all stupid for not seeing the genious of our plan!”
It’s already here. I go to RPI, the school with the laptops. The whole plan blows. It was poorly organized, poorly executed, poorly thought out, and poorly utilized. And they won’t admit that they were wrong. So I’m stuck supporting my friends computers when they really have no need to own their own, and would normally be using school computers, many of which have been removed from campus labs.
Yes, I dislike it very much, as much as I love the school.
