Kevin Coriolan | News Editor

At a Buena Vista University (BVU) Community Meeting last week, President Fred Moore announced that BVU will stop issuing laptops to incoming students beginning in the fall of 2015, phasing out the university’s laptop program that has been in place since 2000.

“When we started the laptop program in 2000, it was a leading edge program, a best-in-breed program, and it isn’t anymore,” Moore said.

Laptops will be issued to incoming students in the fall of 2014. Moore said the brand of laptops that will be provided and the structure of the program should be announced to students before the holiday break.

Beginning in fall 2015, the university will move to a “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) student technology model. The BYOD initiative will be phased in, meaning that existing students with BVU-issued laptops will be able to keep those laptops throughout the duration of their time as a BVU student, including those issued to new students next fall 2014. However, incoming fall 2015 students, who will be the first in the BYOD program, will not receive a laptop from the university but will be expected to have a laptop that meets certain specifications defined by the university.

Moore noted that BVU will continue to service the university-issued computers for the duration of their existence on campus through 2Fix. Also, under the BYOD program, 2Fix will service any student device within certain parameters that meets particular specifications. Those specifications have not yet been decided.

“We recognize that we’re not one block from the Geek Squad here in Storm Lake, and there are limited options for having your machine repaired,” Moore said.

In explaining why the university has made this decision, Moore noted that only 3% of higher educations institutions in the country provide laptops to their students. He also said the decision to discontinue the laptop program was made only after the university received market research data that indicated university-provided laptops were not a main factor in student enrollment.

“We did some very sophisticated market research with SimpsonScarborough, a really first-rate market research/strategic planning/marketing firm in higher ed. They are one of the best…One of the things we wanted to ask is how important is the laptop to the enrollment decision?” Moore said.

Moore noted that the research indicated having a laptop provided by the institution is only “moderately important” to a student’s enrollment decision.

Vice President of Academic Affairs and Dean of Faculty Dr. David Evans explained that the market research was done through a survey from a “public sample.” The sample consisted of prospective students from a high school audience, and that audience indicated having an institution provide the laptop was relatively low in the decision factors for attending a college or university.

“When you see how those answers are distributed, you get some interesting ideas about what is important to people and what isn’t,” Evans said.

Moore was careful to point out that this is not to say that laptops are not important to learning.

“Especially at BV, where we have 13 years of history of having ubiquitous availability of laptops, laptops are highly integrated into the academic program here, and that’s a good thing,” Moore said. “We’re glad that happened. So in thinking about what we should do with the laptop program, we’ve got to balance these considerations of, on the one hand, it isn’t really important to the enrollment decision, but having a laptop available to you sure is important to your academic work.”

Moore said that administrators are looking for that balance as they work on the laptop phase-out and the BYOD phase-in.

Evans said that further plans have been drafted by the President’s Council on how to implement the BYOD initiative, but he cannot discuss those plans until after the Board of Trustees approves them. Evans did say that he thinks the plans will be pleasing to existing BVU students. “As long as the board approves it, the plan that we’re working on right now is going to be really good. I think students are going to like it,” Evans said.

“It is a compromise that has benefits for students that they will like,” Evans said.

Moore feels that the timing is right for the ending of the BVU laptop program, but noted that administrators are not rushing it and leaving time to have adequate discussions about how to handle all possible contingencies.

“The fact of the matter is many students have a laptop anyway,” Moore said. “They get laptops for graduation presents. In some cases, they want laptops that are more powerful than the ones that we provide. And so we feel like this is the right step to take. But we’re going to require them to bring a laptop with them that meets specs so that we don’t damage the academic program.”

Photo by Makensie Brown