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School issues students laptops
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For many years, Northwest Missouri State University in Maryville has provided students with desktop computers in their dorm rooms. This year, the school is replacing them with laptops for its 2,300 on-campus students. Total enrollment is about 6,500 students.
Free laptops? Not exactly.
Like most things in life, they come at a cost. Resident students will see a $45 increase in housing fees each semester to help subsidize the 3,000 Gateway computers the university bought in bulk.
Add that to a current technology fee, and students will pay about $240 toward the laptops, said Jon Rickman, vice president for information services. The retail value of each computer is probably $800 to $900, he said.
Rickman said that some private schools charge closer to $1,000 a year for similar arrangements and that Northwest students were getting a great deal.
Now, the school will be a “notebook university,” Rickman said. As part of this initiative, many professors are receiving tablet computers.
The school, 90 miles north of Kansas City, has called itself the “electronic campus” since 1987 by instituting innovations such as putting networked computers in every dorm room.
The laptops come with up-to-date software and a drive that can play DVDs or burn CDs. Because so many students will be using the computers, the school can better support and service them and professors can cater more lessons to them, Rickman said.
The school plans to buy new laptops every three years, so computers won’t get outdated. If students had bought their own computers, they might have ended up buying two computers to stay current by the time they graduated, he said.
A small number of universities across the country offer similar programs, but many of them are at private schools, not public ones such as Northwest, said Rickman.
According to an annual survey of 890 colleges and universities by the non-profit group EDUCAUSE, about 5.3 percent of institutions that offer bachelors degrees provided their students with a computer, and 1.8 percent required that students buy or lease computers in 2004.
Jordan Orscheln, a senior at Northwest, hasn’t had to buy her own computer since she came to the school. “I haven’t needed to,” said Orscheln, who is from Moberly, Mo.
She said the dorm room computers could be difficult at times because students had to share the computer.
Since school started this week, Orscheln said, she has seen many students walking around campus carrying the black laptop cases with Northwest and Gateway symbols on them.
Students haven’t complained much about the higher fees to pay for the laptops, said Orscheln, who is on student government. They are more upset about a $75 health fee that was instituted this year in lieu of co-payments for visits to the health center, she said.
There is already a waiting list for off-campus students who want to rent laptops for $150 a semester. Students can keep them over the summer for an extra $75.
Kavita Kumar / St. Louis Post-Dispatch