The problem with college e-mail
September 14, 2009 by Geneva ReidPosted in: In this week's e-newsletter, Latest News & Views, Tech News
What’s the solution to college students’ complaints that their e-mail inboxes are too small? Looks like outsourcing e-mail is the answer – with numerous colleges turning to Google and Microsoft.
Currently, more than 2,000 schools have turned to Google. Not surprising, since a Google-managed e-mail account doesn’t cost anything – and has a capacity 70 times greater than the typical college account.
Microsoft also manages e-mail for free for thousands of colleges in more than 85 countries.
Call it a trend to satisfy the seemingly insatiable need for larger-capacity inboxes, or call it a smart business move. But either way, outsourcing benefits schools by allowing them to avoid expensive server upgrades.
Notre Dame says it saved $1.5 million with Google in storage and tech costs. Arizona State says it saved $400,000 with the company. Washington State University hopes to save $100,000 with Microsoft.
According to Time.com, last year’s Campus Computing Project found that 42% of colleges were outsourcing – or getting ready to outsource – their student e-mail service. Nearly 30% reported they were considering making the switch. And of the schools that made the switch, 57% went with Google, and 38% chose Microsoft.
Is your school outsourcing its e-mail? Let us know in the comments section below.
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Tags: Arizona State, Google, Microsoft, Notre Dame, Washington State University
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September 16th, 2009 at 1:17 pm
I haven’t heard any plans to outsource email. We have (raging) debates about privacy, datamining, advertising and so on. No one wants to talk about Yahoo, Microsoft or other companies (yes, even Google) bowing to corporate, legal or government pressures to turn over names and email addresses. Putting more university data in outside hands doesn’t seem very smart to me.
I’ve worked in IT for over a decade and have heard every excuse under the sun why email accounts / file storage / print quotas / etc. are never big enough for students or faculty. Most people want bigger email inboxes to mail bigger files back and forth. That was never the purpose of email in the first place!
September 16th, 2009 at 5:36 pm
Because a vast majority of our students weren’t using (and/or refused to use) the campus email accounts they were assigned, we decided to stop wasting money on email services and just let the students use what ever email service provider they want to use. The student email service is being shut down this December.
September 16th, 2009 at 6:07 pm
If there is a problem here, it is with students who have stopped seeing University-provided free e-mail as a luxury. You don’t make demands when somebody gives you a gift (unless you are a member of today’s entitlement-fed society, apparently). Frankly, such systems were a good idea in the past when free-mail was hard to come by, but anymore it is simply a drain of University resources. Why spend time setting up a gmail account for your students when half already have one and the other half use hotmail or yahoo? Just put another line on the application for admission, “Existing e-mail account here:” and use those thousands of taxpayer dollars for something useful.
September 17th, 2009 at 10:10 am
MIT and Duke have two very successful email programs for their students and alumni that are both useful and that help keep alumni engaged with their alma maters.
Those instances help demonstrate the business case for providing email service, but also make it clear that the obligation is on the school and the IT department to make it something more than a commodity.
It’s certainly possible to do this with a system like GMail… infact we’re migrating over 800,000 users onto GMail in Europe as we speak as part of our LMS package. The key, however, is to make sure that that utility is packaged within an “authentic” university environment that encourages (not restricts) the use of those accounts for academic purposes (for instance letting an email be automatically logged into an LMS as a response to an assignment).
Woud be happy to hear your feedback… mike@itslearning.com
September 17th, 2009 at 11:09 am
“Why spend time setting up a gmail account for your students when half already have one……Just put another line on the application for admission, ‘Existing e-mail account here:’ and use those thousands of taxpayer dollars for something useful.” — UnivDeskDriver
Yes, that is exactly what we are doing, starting in December, for the exact reasons you stated.