The costs of making such a change are more those of fear and inertia than of economics. As more schools, public and private, begin to require each student to have a laptop computer, the kind of competition that first forced schools to offer computer access to students will help make this new option as ubiquitous as the college computer lab is today. Hopefully for our students, this new innovation won't take quite as long to spread. We have not, however, required students to have their own computers. Students who do not have computers use a central computer lab, which is often unavailable for non-instructional use.
Faculty members use the system primarily for e-mail, and many use the Internet as a research tool.
There is some concern about adding costs to an already expensive education. The additional cost to the student has not been precisely calculated, however. Computer-hardware costs are declining rapidly. This does not seem significant in comparison with the annual tuition cost. There is considerable concern about the potential misuse of computer resources.