CLARIFICATION (09/25/2013): The following article has been updated from its original format to clarify information regarding the continuation of the iPad initiative at BVU.

Kevin Coriolan | News Editor

Laptops at Buena Vista University (BVU) may be on their last whim.

During the most recent Student Senate meeting Vice President for Student Affairs Dr. Meg McKeon announced that there are plans to drop the laptop program at BVU. Laptops have been handed out to all Storm Lake students for over a decade, but the university is questioning the financial investment of the program.

When the laptop program was introduced to campus, the average price of laptops was up to thousands of dollars for a conventional student. The difference today is that the technology is a lot more prevalent for all students.

“The kind of industry trend in colleges like BVU is towards something that is commonly abbreviated as BYOD: bring your own device,” Vice President for Academic Affairs Dr. David Evans said. “It’s not unlikely that we’ll discontinue the laptop program and there are a lot of reasons.”

Laptops are updated every two to four years with new computers for all students. The current models, the HP ProBook and the Apple MacBook, were offered as early as 2011. The iPad 2 also was a new edition to technology offered to students. More recently, there is less of a need for technology by students.

“For one, we are increasingly getting incoming students who already have one or want one that’s more powerful,” Evans said. In this case, obstacles may come about for students with no access to a computer. Evans believes that BVU’s culture assumes that everyone has a laptop. Often international students do not own laptops before coming to BVU.

The decision should be made official by early spring. This is the time that recruiting for incoming freshmen of 2015 begins.

There are some students who believe that the laptops were appealing when applying to BVU. “It helped my decision because it was a pro as opposed to a con,” freshman Claire Boston said. Although it was not the final say on her coming to BVU, she saw it as the means to the end of buying a laptop.

While the laptop decision remains to be made, Evans indicated that iPads will likely not be issued to new students as early as next fall. Current students who already have a laptop and iPad will be able to keep both until they graduate. Evans also noted that iPad 2s have been successfully utilized by a few professors in some classes, and so any new program would likely include some system for check-out of iPads for use where they are effective learning tools.

“You can do more on a laptop than an iPad,” Boston said. Computers allow better use of the Internet and provide applications such as Microsoft Word that the iPad does not carry along with other software.

The advantage of having iPad’s though are the rise of electronic books which was the main idea of the university when iPad’s were first introduced to BVU.

“It’s about doing what’s right academically,” Evans said. “The goal of the faculty is that students have access and are able to do the homework.”

The laptops will still be distributed to faculty and staff.

Photo by Makensie Brown