If the plan were offered? I’d ignore it, and so would everyone else I know. I already ignore a great many things “offered” by my school, some of which I suspect nobody has ever taken them up on, and are listed in the brochure solely to impress parents.
If the plan were required and I was on a full ride scholarship, so it didn’t cost me anything? Take the phone, either leave it in a drawer or introduce it to a large rock and maybe the back tire of an SUV in the parking lot. There are lots of nifty parts inside cell phones, even crappy ones. I have a friend who likes prying capacitors off of dead motherboards; she’d love the chance to take apart an official university telefonino.
If the plan were required and they wanted me to pay for it? I’d change college or throw a fit. You can get yourself exempt from several programs here at my university just by annoying Residence Life long enough. Meal plans are supposed to be required for all incoming freshman, but if you spend about three weeks at the start of the semester not using it and calling the office about it every fifteen minutes they’ll take it off your bill and refund your money.
As for notifications, my university implemented, at the start of this year, a free service that will text news, emergency notifications, and things like snow closures to whatever cell phone you sign up. It costs you whatever texts normally cost you, and it’s opt-in only. They have managed not to abuse it so far; the only notification I’ve gotten this year was when some intrepid soul pulled off an armed robbery at the Wells Fargo right next to campus, and the cops were afraid he might be in the university woodlands. For those who don’t sign up, the alerts also go out via email to the student body, on the regular university computing infrastructure.
It reminds me of the laptop I was “required” to buy before I started med school, which was underpowered, a generation behind, and crazy overpriced. They had all these elaborate plans for programs and workshops that required everyone to have the same computer. Except they never did any of them. Fortunately a couple of second-year students tipped me off so I was one of only a handful who didn’t buy one.
It sounds like most of the useful benefits could be done through students’ existing phones, especially notifications and the like. If not, then they should do what they’re going to do and if it’s worth it to the students they’ll buy it.
Except they don’t do that, either. The program my school uses sends students to a website, where the student proves they are a student by logging in, then types their phone number into a blank. The service sends a text to the number provided, which contains a confirmation number that the student then enters into another blank on the web page. Seeing as the company running the notification service is a separate entity contracted by the university to do this, the only labor the school is actually performing is the effort needed to issue them periodic checks.
What you’ve missed is that today’s students like to make phone calls or text during classes.
This modern, farsighted policy means that they continue to do that, but also ‘interact’ with the weird old person at the front of class (who thinks that people ‘learn’ by listening ).
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