Should Colleges Continue to Host Email for Their Students? – ReadWriteWeb

More and more professionals I speak with are echoing the idea that the University should not be in the e mail business.  Some even project that as broadband becomes more prevalent via mobile, that providing IP access will diminish, too.  Frederic Lardinois column in April 10’s Read Write Web says:

Schools, for the most part, aren’t able to keep up with the speed of innovation on the web anyway, and the fact that many college-run email systems have fallen far behind the innovation curve has driven a lot of students to just forward their school email to a commercial account anyway.

The ideas are spreading, as Lardinois points out:

The logical next step, then, is to simply stop providing .edu email addresses to students – and a number of schools are actually considering this move. Last month, at The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Technology Forum, Steven Zink of the University of Nevada in Reno announced that his campus plans to stop providing students with a college email system altogether.

via Should Colleges Continue to Host Email for Their Students? – ReadWriteWeb.