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Buy College Education, Get Free iBook
kraksmoka writes ""The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article about how Saint Leo University in Florida is offering an iBook laptop to every incoming residential student and full-time faculty member. '... the draw of the iBooks has encouraged some of the more than 1,700 students at the university's main campus who would otherwise commute to live in dormitories, which makes the program a success in the university vice president's eyes.'" The students do not keep the computers, unless they finish two years in the honors program.
They demand two years work for a $1,500 computer? Shit, I could make enough to buy one working at McDonald's for just a couple of months!
Education? What? I'm missing something? Huh?
when I started college, all we had were labs full of z29 and wyse terminals. and we liked it. so there.
must... stay... awake...
Apple should jump on this as a marketing tool but spin it the other way: Buy an iBook, get a scholarship to the third-rate college of your choice!
filmcritic.com - Movie reviews on Internet time
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The reason people commute is to save the >$5000 cost of room and board. Why would they trade that savings in for a $2000 laptop that they can't even keep? One would be much better off buying their own iBook and commuting -- total savings of $3000, rather than plunking down $3000 ($5000 room/board minus laptop) for the 'rental' of an iBook.
The students do not keep the computers, unless they finish two years in the honors program.
Wow, at my old college, they are forcing all the engineers to have laptops (even have a used laptops for sale), but you have to buy them. And even if they supplied them, giving them away is -huge-. Think about it. If you get an iBook for free, its equivalent to going to school for a free semester...
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Call me cynical, but: How much did the tuition increase to pay for this? For some reason, tuition wasn't mentioned... What's the rate of theft on campus? Now with tuition and "student fees", they can pay both a Mac and a Microsoft tax. Great. Any what does any of this have to do with receiving a higher education?
Look how they copy Microsoft's tactic of giving away computers with their OS.
Give students your OS, get them convinced that it's the only way a computer should work, and you've got a loyal userbase that *should* continue to use your OS and buy upgrades from you, instead of your competitors.
I'd like to see this program offer a choice. Do you want a MacOS, M$, or some flavor of unix on your free laptop?
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Although I didn't see anything in the article about it, the money for these things has to come from somewhere ... and that eventually comes down to higher tuition. Not only that, but only a subset of the students get the computers -- I would be willing to bet that the cost is subsidized by all the students. Why can't they just let students buy their own computers (possibly through a school program) rather than raising prices so that they can "give" everyone a school-authorized laptop?
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
You give school iBook!
I for one welcome our new SCOviet Russian overlords to whom all our base are belong.
I wish they had this program way back when I was in college. I lived on the computer science floor and our benefit was dial-up access to the mainframe.
/dream sequence
dream sequence
Me talking to my grandkids. Ah, you kids don't know how good you have it. Why, when I was your age TV was two-dimensional in black and white. And we only had four channels and no remote control. And we were glad to have them. Heck, if we wanted to change the channel we had to walk two miles, through ten feet of snow, barefoot.
I wouldn't say I'm a bad gambler but the last time I went to Vegas I even lost a buck on the soda machine.
They don't exactly have a Masters in Business. How can you expect them to do such complex addition and subtraction with only a puny high school diploma?
End of Post
You are at the end of the post. To the north lies the post.
There is a sig here.
and i am convinced that my new iBook 800 with combo drive is the best Mac i've ever owned. It took about 2 days for me to belive that.
(PB 100, Duo 230, 280c, 180c, 520c, 660AV, 7500, G4/450, and TiBook 550 if you really care to know)
It is cheap (as in beer), its fast, its rock solid construction, its got a sexy bright screen, its got very good wireless coverage, its light (in grams), it has every port i could ever want, and its simple in design which doesn't lend itself to breakage of parts (like my work's Thinkpad with now broken USB door and broken PCCard buttons)
so what?
This is a great plan and gives students a great leg up with the ultimate college computer. I wish that i had had the opportunity 12 years ago when i went to college to get a PowerBook 100 (included with tution price).
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
My college only offers residence to undergraduate students. So if they did offer this and you're graduate, then not only you can't get a cheaper (erm...) roof, but also you can't get a free version of OS X. No switch from me...
The ENIAC Demo Competition
but it doesn't seem to be attracting the brightest students. Since they are really just *lending* the ibooks to the residents, they can keep recycling them each year. Remember the original toilet seat ibook? Even if some students do complete the honors program and keep the ibooks, that expense is made back many times over by increased rent income for the school. A smart investment, definitely, but who are these people? Persuaded to spend a lot more for on campus housing for a $900 value spread over four years? That's about $18 per month, maybe the school should just offer them a few 12 packs.
One of my co-workers is in the Masters of Technical Management program at Embry-Riddle University(Daytona, FL), and included with tuition you get a Dell/WinXP laptop, that you get to keep. The cool thing is that with my company's tuition reimbursement plan paying 100% of tuition, it's like the company is buying him a laptop!(and the graduate degree is a nice bonus too)
Sex - Find It
What the hell is up with this joke?!?!? I keep seeing it everywhere now. The only only reference I can find in mass media is on The Family Guy.
Or is Smirnoff's Branson theater that big of a cult(ural) hit? Please, please, for the love of god. Explain why this bad joke is on the rebound.
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I am an expert in electricity. My father held the chair of applied electricity at the state prision.
Meanwhile....fee's to attend this college go up the exact price of an Apple IBook.
In college, really poor, need a flatscreen.
The students do not keep the computers, unless they finish two years in the honors program.
;-)
So this means that one would have a pretty good chance of getting someone's old iBook, full of pr0n and cached slashdot posts, right?
sudo eat my shorts
I've been able to recruit strong research students by giving them iBooks as well as a decent stipend, and Airport works so well that it's saved me the trouble of worrying about wiring the lab they use and they love using Airport all over the place. I've got some dedicated and loyal students who are doing lots of cool things and being able to give them good machines is definitely responsible for part of that.
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
With that kind of price difference, he could even buy a beowulf cluster of those lapt... *smack*
*ouch*
*wince*
Quite the shock to check /. and see yer dad on the front page :)
Maine has started a program giving iBooks to 7th graders. Their goal is to eventually loan one to EVERY middle school student in the state. I did a quick google search and here's the first article I found.
Actually, I was trying to be Insightful, not Funny.
There's a study incentive if I ever heard one. I slacked like Bob Dobbs for the first three years of my college career because there was no instant gratification for doing well. If scoring a 4.0 got me a free computer when I graduated I would have done the boring busy work and maybe even gone to lectures.
Yeah, I know I was paying out the ass to fail, I know now anyway, but when faced with the freedom to bust my hump or stay in bed all day I took the latter. A simple thing like offering me a hawt computer would have been enough to wake me up. Funny how that works.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Man with free laptop merely waiting for dancer.
Steve Jobs
Apple Computer
I graduated in the mid 80's, please send me one of your iBooks.
Thank you,
grubby
Trolling is a art,
Whenever I see "cheep" it makes me think of the little red fishes in Super Mario Bros...
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
For that matter, I once ran across Sally Jessie Raphael while flipping channels and recognized a friend's wife as a guest. The topic of the show?
Married Prostitutes. I'm not making that up. The friend died of AIDS last year.
KFG
The students do not keep the computers, unless they finish two years in the honors program.
My college has these iMacs that we used to use for our homework assignments. One day, I editting my photos and downloading to my iPod on it when all of a sudden a letter from the registrar's office came in. They said I flunked out, and they took my Mac. All of it! The printer, too! I had to move out back to my dad's house quickly. Needless to say, dad's house isn't nearly as good, and I blame that iMac for failing out.
I'm happy to report my dad has a PC and it crashes too much to actually do anything fun on, so now I just rush my papers and they're good enough for the local community college, and my grades have all been really good.
Thanks a lot, Apple.
Ellen
I think you need to take a basic economics course. Your math seems a bit off.
And that's only for *tuition.* Remember, this program posits paying room and board for two years as well to get the "free" computer.
KFG
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Maybe it's like the shaving razor thing: give away the razor, but charge a fortune for thblades. Maybe the school gives away laptops, but charges a ton for power, internet connection, etc...
_______
2B1ASK1
In my city I would have my choice of two schools within 10 minutes walk from my parents home. One of them is a city community college allied with the state system ( get your associates at the city college and automatic transfer to the four year program at state) and one is an expensive, ritzy, private college of high repute (Union). And this in a city of only 50,000 residents.
I could get a new "businessman's" one bedroom apartment, equally within walking distance, for only $450/month. Ok, that's $5,400/year, plus food, but to have my own home rather than a dorm room. Get a roomate, if you are so inclined, and have the shared home, but enough left over to buy the laptop on your own, and odds are you'ld have to share the crappy little dorm room anyway, with a "bathroom" you have to share with the whole frikkin' dorm, not just one other person. Rent the apartment first yourself and you even have *personal choice* up front over whether you think your potential roomie is suitable. Pop for another $500/year between the two of you and you each get your own bedroom.
A "college student's special" studio apartment would only set you back $350/month (yes, with everything). That's only $4200 a year.
Most colleges have private student housing available within walking distance of campus, and those that don't I've found usually provide free shuttlebus service to/from town. Not as convienient as your own car but a damned sight cheaper.
Living on your own in town can also be the difference between being able to keep up with your school work AND maintain a part-time job, and not being able to work except for a "student work program" which pays less than minimun wage. This difference alone could make up for a couple of iBooks a year.
All that being said there are valid reasons beyond the financial for the college encouraging people to live on campus. Thoreau once marveled at the fact that colleges charge you money for the least valuable service they provide, i.e. classes, while the most valuable service, living within the enviroment of the campus and associating with all and sundry in that enviroment, essentially came free. He had a point.
KFG
Well, you was lucky then. In *my* day we had to use slide rules and *guess* where the decimal point went, uphill, both ways.
And we liked it!
Oh, did I mention eating cold lump of poison? Oh, wait, you still have to do that, don't you? At least the quality of college food is a social constant.
Another reason to forgo the iBook and live off campus.
KFG
All in all though, it's a good program that I commend the University of Florida for taking up. Now only if I got an iBook instead of the ThinkPad
Would this be newsworthy if it wasn't an iBook? It seems that /. has joined Wired in the practice of publishing articles that are not newsworthy as long as Macs are involved. Would this be news if they were giving away Dell's? If they were giving away free M$ software this would be a warning article but since it is Apple, the university can push Apple's platform by giving away free hardware and software without the tiniest bit of dissent on /.. If MS made a laptop and this university gave away MS laptops preloaded with windowsXP, people would be screaming that the world is going to end.
Acadia University in Canada (http://www.acadiau.ca) has been doing something like this for a while. The difference is that everybody at Acadia gets an IBM thinkpad when they go there, they don't have to "work" for it. They upgrade the model they use every two years and you can buy it from them for cheap at the end of the school year. It's a nice system, but then again Acadia is one of the most expensive schools in Canada
it has every port i could ever want
You must be one of the lucky few here with a girlfriend. I believe the /. term for a person like you is "temporary visitor." :)
It all goes downhill from first post
He took that into account. Don't be a fool yourself?
What's more, you don't even get to keep it for the entire two years. You have to give it back at the end of each year. Bet you don't get "yours" back at the begining of the year either. That's a major "pain in the ass" factor. Plus you automatically get charged for any nonwarrenty damage done to you "your" computer, even if it's damage *you* would just live with.
It would be interesting to know what the standard failure rate in the honors program is, wouldn't it?
For that matter, I not sure of the quality of the school. Every college of quality that I've ever been to considered *everybody* to be in the "honors" program. The very existence of such a program smacks of "junior" college, pay to be in extended high school. In other words they don't really consider their "non-honors" students to be doing legitimate college work.
At a "real" college you do your work as best you can as everyone is expected to and if you go above and beyond you get your Cum Laude at the end of it.
Ok, I don't *totally* mean to belittle such colleges. There is a legitmate need for some people to get two year "degrees" in "hotel hospitality." ( Because they haven't learned on their own to be polite to customers or how to make a bank deposit?) But I'm not sure I'd want to enroll in a college as a serious student that makes such overt distinctions between its "real" students and its "fake" ones.
If you're the sort who feels the need for that sort of rank of social superiourity just go to a "real" college and join an uptight, snooty frat or something.
KFG
I'm currently a student at Webb Institute in Glen Cove, NY on the north shore of Long Island. Our school is one of only 6 or so schools in the country that grant degrees in Naval Architecture and Marine Engineer. The school "gives" us all computers when we first arrive the first weekend. They are ours until we, fail out, leave, or graduate when they offer to sell them to us for the value of the a survey of eBay prices for similar machines. We don't have tuition so they don't raise our tuition to pay for them and our room and board are significantly low enough to not be the source of computer funding. Along with the laptops our campus has a wireless network so we are able to check our mail, work with software with network locks and surf the internet (play quake, read /.) from anywhere on campus. I can honestly say that having the computer has been invaluble. It is much easier to work on a group project and be able to sit around a library table or in another common area and spread out papers and work than to have a bunch of people huddled around a screen in a computer lab. Its a lot easier to email files back and forth than to have everyone use the same computer. We use our computers for almost all our classes, in chemistry we put lab data right into the computer we'll be writing the report from, math we use Maple and mathcad, NA and ME we use special programs such as HecSalv and GHS. We live under an honor code so theft of the laptops isn't a problem, as well as having 24/7 to anyplace on campus, I can and do leave my laptop in the Library at my desk in the classroom and anywhere else I want to put it down. Hell I could leave a breifcase of diamonds lying around and no one would touch them. Actually the only real prob with the computers is when you're working on them from 10 to 23 1/2 hours a day (sometimes you just have to stop to eat) they're just not as rugged as they could be (and the're running Win, I would prefer a Mac or Linux but hey stupid engineering software...)
chose to live on campus, and please note that my argument for living off campus was considerably longer and better reasoned, as well as my own opinion, rather than quoting someone else's. Something that Thoreau himself always admired in a person.
I only added the notation in the form of "journalistic fairness."
And for some ( as it was for Thoreau, and I don't think ANYONE can accuse old H.D. of being toadying to clique acceptence or class structure. He *is* the author of Walden, as well as Civil Disobedience and Life Without Principal after all) it *is* a valid point.
Not for you. Not for me. But for some.
KFG
My college began to "give" (part of fees) laptops to all incoming students in 1995, pretty much the first school to do so.
My new laptop was a PII-233 Acer, with a 3.2GB drive and I opted for 64MB of RAM instead of 32MB. It only had a 800x600 screen, but it served me well my four years, and I still use it semi-regularly (though it has 160MB of RAM now). The laptop was ours, though any unauthorized hardware tinkering would void the nice 4-year warranty. During my stay, I had two motherboards, one hard drive, one LCD screen, the upper plastic shell, two LCD front and back bezels, a power supply board, and a power brick replaced.
While the laptop was invaluable for getting work done, it was also a distraction. With a network port at every desk, ICQ became the equivalent of note-passing. Many kids I knew freshman year had to drop out, as they spent the majority of their time playing Starcraft and Quake II, chatting on ICQ and IRC, playing in MUDs, and downloading MP3s. Still, it was pretty useful for emailing professors, getting reports done, and making CEOs jealous in airports.
The major heartache with laptop ownership happened every fall, when the freshmen would get their shiny new laptops, one full year of computing technology later. During the last year, it was getting difficult to run some of the applications needed for class, on outdated hardware. Everyone I knew ended up buying a desktop machine. With the network connection, I could RDP, VNC, or X applications from my desktop to my laptop. This was pretty much necessary when trying to crunch large mathematical problems in MATLAB; *especially* useful when modeling 3D electromagnetic fields. The laptop was also unable to make anyone jealous.
If there was one thing I would change about the laptop program, it would be to update the hardware every two years. A two-year-old laptop would still hold some value for charity or resale, and the upperclassmen would not be held down by inferior hardware during their most intensive classes.
...
Doesn't everyone find it ironic that the most heavily worked and under-appreciated folks at a university, the Teaching Assistants and other staff people, are NOT eligable for the iBook deal?
No, I have never been a TA.
And I never want to be one.
It's probably cheaper than everyone buying their iBooks separately. Bulk orders always work out cheaper per unit, moreso for educational institutions.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Cost is one thing. There's also support. If you're giving away laptops, the vast majority of students will try to tinker with them and will also need support for them. With only one platform, you can cost-effictively train your tech staff to one consistent set of hardware and software. Plus, Apple is known for building very nicely integrated software and hardware. That'll make support far easier.
Also, as everyone knows, iBooks come with OS X. I can see tremendous advantages for distributing preconfigured, UNIX laptops: you can lock students out of their system: Only allow them to write within their home directory. Give them zero administrative privileges to their system. Oh poor baby can't install some games or an MP3 peer-to-peer file swapper? Tough shit. This is supposed to be a learning tool. You're a smartass and chose to re-install the operating system from scratch? Very well, don't come asking for support. And have fun re-installing all the college-sanctioned applications for your classwork. University tech staff will gladly re-install those applications for you from their master copies for a small $100 fee and re-whiping your drive and re-installing the appropriate pre-set system configuration relevant to your major.
There are a slew of things that could be easily done with unix / OS X that could be completely transparent to the students to both render them more productive and protect them from themselves. server-hosted roaming home directories. Remote ssh administration for troubleshooting or sporadic help. Standardized built-in firewall settings on all laptops to supplement on-campus firewalls, using BSD's built-in ipfw utility. Create custom default Dock Application icons for various kinds of students, to appropriately immediately surface the applications and utilities that are the most relevant to their course work, and all that stuff is specified in XML Configuration files in OS X: Art students would get Photoshop and Illustrator in their Dock, while Computer Science students would get the Terminal Icon as well as maybe XDarwin, Vim for OS X, BBEdit, CodeWarrior, or any of the apps that come in the Apple Developer CD-ROM. And as far as any student working in just about any science/engineering field, but let's just say computer science for sure, OS X is definitely *the* tool of choice.
Between XML configuration files, shell scripts, network file sharing backed by the strength of UNIX, which was, at its core designed to be a strong, secure multi-user environment, to allow users of a system to perform certain specific tasks while not being able to break the system, OS X seems to me like the absolute perfect operating system for academia. Combine that with Apple's beautiful yet rock-solid industrial design in the form of the iBook, and you've got yourself the perfect platform for the hyperactive lifestyle of a college student.
Regardless of platform, i would keep those built-in hard drives as small as their major and planned coursework allows, and put a greater emphasis on network-based storage.
Extraordinary Vacations. Exceptional Prices
Back in 1986 I went to Clarkson U, in part because of a similar deal. I got a Zenith AT or something like it with two 5-1/4" drives (one was high density!) and no hard drive. I failed out a year and a half later, but here I am at /. so it couldn't have all been a waste. Could it? (On second thought, don't answer that...)
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
No, it isn't the least bit new. My college has been handing out laptops to all incoming students since *1997*. Five years ago. And the students get to keep the laptops.
:-(
Of course, unfortunately I didn't get one because I wasn't a freshman in '97, so all these new students got nice shiny new laptops and I had to leave empty-handed...
Chasing Amy
(We all chase Amy...)
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws"-Tacitus