I read a post a few weeks ago on academhack about the fact that Boston College is no longer giving email addresses to incoming students, but rather allowing them to just continue to use their own personal email accounts that they’re bringing with them. There was some discussion related to that post which caused another post that I read today.

Today’s post details out the benefits/reasoning for not providing students with a .edu email address and frankly, I think it makes perfect sense.  Here’s an excerpt:

Campuses got in the business of offering email prior to hotmail and gmail, when many students arrived at campus without having an email account. In fact my first email account in 1993 was a uchicago account. Given that moment in the development of the internet it only made sense for campuses, regardless of infrastructure cost to offer accounts to all of their students. The only way that they could be assured that students had email accounts was to provide them. This in turn produced a low cost way for campuses to communicate with their student body. And for the most part students used these accounts as their primary accounts. Indeed I recall when students used to scramble to figure out how to keep their email accounts after leaving college, because it was their primary or only account.

Fast forward to now, most, in not all of our students come to campus with an existing email account, one which they have used for several years already, one attached to their “online identity” (okay I really don’t believe in the idea of online vs. offline identity, hence the scare quotes, but you get my point). So having a campus email address is now a burden, one more piece of information for them to monitor, which they generally only begrudgingly do, because the only communication they get via this account if official campus stuff. (In fact the younger generations don’t use email nearly as much, instead relying on text messaging, but I digress.)

I know that personally, I am making every effort to combine and incorporate as many of my accounts as possible and I wouldn’t hesitate to use a personal email address for my university business.  I also know that I speak with students every day, most of whom are adult students and almost always they prefer to use their personal email address and not the provided .edu address. In fact, there have been many times where I’ve had students say “Oh, I never check that email account”.

It really is worth your time to read the entire post. I think it’s important that we really start thinking about things in a different way. Maybe soon we’ll just use text messaging or expect that students will subscribe to our blogs and we won’t use email at all anymore. I think we’re on our way.