<p>As long as I am on a rant, I have an additional beef. Namely the fact that colleges are always talking about the cost of computing. It came up earlier in this thread, but I have seen it other places.</p>
<p>Students are buying their own laptops. Or rather, parents of students are buying laptops. </p>
<p>The cost of bandwidth is relatively low ($50/month, retail) and some schools explicitly charge for this.</p>
<p>Wireless is a cheap technology.</p>
<p>If colleges aren’t getting offsetting productivity gains, they should go back to paper and people.</p>
<p>Plus, since most students at the kinds of colleges discussed on CC have their own laptops or desktops, schools should get rid of all the shared computers and computer labs that have built up over the years.</p>
<p>Given Moore’s Law, the cost of computing cycles is decreasing rapidly, so the idea that colleges need to spend heavily on IT is silly if they are doing it efficiently.</p>