Should Colleges Continue to Host Email for Their Students?
In the earliest days of the Internet, getting an .edu email address and signing in to Pine for the first time was a rite of passage for many college freshmen. Now, however, virtually every new college student got an email address before even graduating from primary school. Because of this, a number of schools are now considering phasing out email hosting for their students altogether. According to a recent report (PDF), 20% of American colleges already outsource their email systems to commercial providers, and more plan to do so in the future.
First Step: Outsourcing
Interestingly, while student email is often outsourced, faculty and staff email is generally hosted in-house because of concerns over confidentiality. Only 2.3% of all schools outsource these systems to commercial vendors.
Schools, for the most part, aren't able to keep up with the speed of innovation on the web anyway, and the fact that many college-run email systems have fallen far behind the innovation curve has driven a lot of students to just forward their school email to a commercial account anyway.
Given the cost pressures that schools are under right now, the choice for these colleges is to either spend a lot of money on providing costly email systems that most students hardly ever look at, or to outsource them to a commercial vendor, or even to Google, which will happily offer these services for free.
Next Step: Get Rid of It
The logical next step, then, is to simply stop providing .edu email addresses to students - and a number of schools are actually considering this move. Last month, at The Chronicle of Higher Education's Technology Forum, Steven Zink of the University of Nevada in Reno announced that his campus plans to stop providing students with a college email system altogether.
Most colleges will probably continue to provide students with an official .edu email address, but this will just be used for forwarding mail to another account - something most students prefer over using their college email systems anyway.
In many ways, this makes a lot of sense. Schools won't give up email as their preferred way of communicating with students anytime soon, but the days when colleges provided the most important on-ramp to email and the Internet for their students are long over.
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It's not the quality of the email service, it's the school directory where the real value lies.
It's the same for corporate email. My job uses Lotus Notes. Most people prefer gmail or yahoo, but they would not be part of our closed system.
Best thing that edu hosted email provides is practice for the IT students to learn how to manage it.
I would love if my school used my personal email instead of my .edu one. However, they have outsourced their email hosting to Google Apps which is actually quite useful. They also organize everything in the school's database by our username which is easily seen by looking at the address. With our own personal ones, they'd have to look it up first.
Having previously worked in the University system, the biggest concern we had was concerning important and time sensitive notifications. There was no guarantee that after the student decided to forward their e-mail to their Yahoo mail account, that they would abandon it later for Gmail and forget to update their profile.
Similarly, with more students favoring Facebook/Twitter/SMS formats for communication with friends, there was no guarantee that they would be checking their e-mail regularly enough for time sensitive e-mails.
The argument was then raised that this information should just be sent via snail mail. The objection that was then raised that some students had confidentiality profiles (FERPA) that restricted access to this kind of information, making that route not possible.
Oddly enough I don't think it is as simple as it seems. The University still needs some kind of "official" channel to communicate with its students in a timely manner. 8^D
Somehow, sending an email to badboy1962@somemail.com just doesn't seem too professional.
I think part of the problem are the e-mail systems that university choose to use. I work at a school that uses an abysmal webmail interface for which they actually pay a lot of money to commercial vendor. Many students and faculty migrate to Gmail just for the sake of being able to manage their messages better. It's not that thay don't like having an .edu address, it's just that the interface is awful. I have mine forwarded to gmail, too.
Considering the current financial status of most schools, this is something that must, not should, be done.
We moved from managing our own student email system to a Gmail product (we call Loopmail), replete with an .edu address ... and it was a boon for our College (Columbia College Chicago) in terms of much larger read rates on all our messages. It also bought us a lot of credibility with our students in terms of our other online efforts.
The problem with not providing an account is the infrequency with which college students check their email and the frequency with which they switch accounts. Colleges send so much mission-critical information via email (financial aid deadlines, registration deadlines, scholarship deadlines, etc.) that missing even two-weeks of messages could mean you don't get to renew your scholarship next year.
with so much sensitive information are being passed through emails, we really need to pay attention about protecting ourselves from internet threats and scams. i remember getting an email regarding my student loans and asking for a bank account number, my university had to send out a univerity wide email to everyone saying it was a scam and not to give out any private information. take a look at this article on justaskgemalto about the different types of email scams and how we can avoid them
Email service can be spam sometimes. So beware.