Boston College takes the important step of not providing incoming freshmen with email addresses. I have argued this before, but, I simply don’t understand why campuses spend so much money trying to maintain and provide students with email addresses. There are so many free services out there, ones which students who are coming into the university are already comfortable with using. Now I know someone is going to mention privacy in the comments here, so let me preempt that comment. Privacy here is a red herring, rather than provide students with a false sense of privacy related to an email account they don’t use we should teach them how to responsibly use the one they will.
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Privacy is a ridiculous argument given that 99.999999% of all emails are not encrypted or even authenticated. Email is not secure. Certainly not campus email!
It seems that my students are able to enter their own email addresses into the system. There is a good reason for this. Imagine you are a part-timer, gainfully employed, and you take a course, or a program (think: MBA). You certainly do not want to have to check both your regular and your school’s email.
In any case, I notice that a lot of professors do not use their school’s email address. I certainly don’t. Mine gets forwarded to Google Mail.
There was a time when “using Google Mail” or “Hotmail” was too informal, but now, we see Stanford and MIT researchers doing it. The “prestige in your email domain” is getting to be a weak argument. During the last workshop I organized, I noticed that at least half of the all researchers and students were sending papers from “informal email addresses” (google mail and hotmail). It seems that the trend is irreversible.
And if you must use your school’s domain, Google offers this service for almost nothing.
I really like having a campus email address as it allows me to separate my “private mail” from my “uni mail” easily, allows me to “prove” my student identity (some sites only allow you to sign up for things if you have a .edu address), and allows me to send and receive emails very quickly internally.
However, this could be achieved by using a mail forwarder!
Forget privacy, what about security? Without providing a standard email to all students, it will be harder to distribute mass security announcements (a measure many colleges have enacted after Virginia Tech.) This means someone or someone coding something is needed to manage a database of student emails. This, yes, leads to privacy issues, but campus IT staffs are already overwhelmed.
I just don’t see the benefit of this decision.
Not to mention: Any student applying for a job will now face possible banishment to a spam folder for using a free email service.
I think more schools will make this switch: I’ve never talked to a campus IT person who WANTS to be an e-mail provider. It’s a massive headache. (My own campus is rumored to be switching to Microsoft’s e-mail solution sometime soon.)
Faculty, by contrast, are formally required to use their campus e-mail address when conducting university business. (To whatever extent you can ‘require’ faculty to do anything.) This apparently has to do with FOIA. The school won’t even allow forwarding of campus e-mail–that is, you can’t set up your e-mail to redirect to another address; obviously you can forward individual messages.
But even this is a pain. The spam filter is more trouble than its worth; it’s hard to calibrate correctly the size of a mailbox to give everyone; etc.
not sure why schools don’t just move this service to Google or Microsoft. Both have great offerings to higher ed.
Spam filtering is a big issue – I often get messages from students blocked if they’re not using their college email addresses, and attachments are also more likely to fail to be delivered. Maybe the problem is on my end, as I only use my institutional email address professionally, but having everyone operating on different servers & systems makes it less likely to have reliable communication within a class.
The only reason I can think to provide campus email is for people who have no email accounts and will require technical support for email. This way one can have a standard email system to support. But this may now be such a small % (probably made up mostly of older faculty and students) that eventually it will be unnecessary. My own college email is a nightmare of non-usability. I can’t get rid of it, of course, and people still send me emails there.
I’d be interested to know how the FOIA could be applied to universities since it is a law that applies to federal agencies as I understand it (albeit in a limited way). Maybe if one is at a state college with a corresponding state law?
My university insists that students have a university email address to which official university notifications can be sent. This is a liability issue – if, for whatever reason, the email message doesn’t get through, and this affects the student’s academic standing, there are obvious legal implications. With a system that the university can itself assure, it limits its liability.
Students are allowed to forward their university account, but then missing emails becomes their problem.
I think email is just one aspect of a larger trend — of 3rd party and free services increasingly being better than what schools can provide in house — better and easier for the empowered user to use on their own. I add to the list other services that are becoming interesting in the same way — blog / wiki hosting as better than local options; online office productivity software as competitive productivity software but also as lite document management; zoho creator-style “databases” as better options than Access or Filemaker databases; Flikr-style image management rather than ArtStor-like local models; I expect learning management system options at some point. Etc.
The scary thing I think for the IT / Library staff is that a user today can do a pretty good job of providing themselves with a suite of free services that compete with anything we can provide, and these services give the user the added benefit of not having to work through their IT / Library staff.
As a university employee I try to keep a strict separation between my personal and work email. In part, because I organize them completely differently. However, as a student there was much less of a distinction. I remember when I was an undergraduate my school posted notices around campus stating that campus email accounts were now the official and primary distribution point of university notices and communications and should therefore be checked weekly. I used my campus email as my primary contact point since Gmail wasn’t out yet and I couldn’t stand the Hotmail interface and advertisements so it wasn’t a problem for me.
While the Records Manager in me says every university employee should use a campus email for university business (and only university business) I can’t say the same for students; although I would ask them to register their primary email with the university for important campus notices and have campus help desks assist students in creating their own free email account if necessary.
For Alex Reid: Yes, it’s a state college in a state with strong FOIA laws.