While techno-phobic students often forgo forwarding their college e-mail to a personal account, soon they may have to learn. Many universities across the country are contemplating getting rid of the college-based e-mail address that most students receive upon enrollment to communicate with teachers and other students.
A 2008 report issued by Educause, a nonprofit involved in the development of information technology in higher education, stated that nearly 10 percent of associate, baccalaureate and master's institutions were considering not giving students school e-mail addresses because many students were already using personal e-mail accounts. This was a considerable change from the 2004 results that stated that only one to two percent of institutions were considering not providing e-mail addresses.
While Tufts provides every student and faculty member with an e-mail address, many students still rely on their personal e-mail accounts and other forms of electronic communication. Some students use the Tufts e-mail address for school and other formal correspondence, while using other e-mail accounts for personal communication.
"When I receive e-mail about school, I just go to the Tufts e-mail inbox," freshman Arthur Arakelov said. "But I would like to forward my e-mail to my personal account. I just don't know how to do that."
However, Arakelov added that he likes the simple Tufts e-mail format, with first name and last name separated by only a period.
"[It] is useful as a means of finding someone else's e-mail because it's just their name," he said. On the other hand, he complained that "the inbox's interface appears to not have been changed since 2000. The e-mails do not show images. It looks bad, but at least it functions."
Freshman Avani Gupta logs in to her Tufts e-mail inbox often due to the fact that "all my Facebook updates are on my Tufts e-mail account." However, the e-mail service doesn't make much difference to her.
"I communicate most of the time through BBM [BlackBerry Messenger] and text messages," she said.
Many students said they forward their Tufts e-mail to their personal e-mail account. Freshman Kate Griffiths said, "It was pretty easy to forward my school e-mail to my personal e-mail account. I don't remember how to do it, but it was not difficult. Now, I just have to remember to use my school e-mail address when I e-mail my teachers."
The costs of maintaining e-mail inboxes have become quite expensive for universities, while many free services, like Google's Gmail, exist for individual users. Therefore, many colleges, such as Abilene Christian University in Texas, have begun to stop providing students with a school-based e-mail inbox to reduce expenses.
Closer to Tufts, Boston College has taken a somewhat different approach to the issue. While the university still issues students "@bc.edu" e-mail addresses and will continue to do so, starting next year, they will no longer provide students with e-mail inboxes — meaning student's university accounts will have to forward to their private e-mail addresses.
"The process in which to forward your school e-mail to your personal account may be difficult at first, but what we are seeing is that many of our students have done this. It has become obvious that many students are not using their [BC] inbox," said Marion Moore, the vice president of Information Technology Services at Boston College. "It is not our primary responsibility for providing an e-mail address when you can get one for free … It is not free for us to give students inboxes. It costs disk space, programmer time."
Even before students attend Boston College, the school mandates that "students applying to Boston College have to have a legitimate e-mail address. Once they are admitted, they get a true Boston College e-mail address," Moore said.
Moore also added that colleges first provided e-mail services when there was no other place for students to get e-mail accounts, which has changed as Gmail, Yahoo and other free e-mail services have gained popularity.
Additionally, according to Moore, it also came to the attention of BC's IT department through data surveys that many students do not use e-mail as their primary source of communication. Many are making the switch to smartphones.
