Colleges Get Out of E-Mail Business

By DAN CARNEVALE

Frantic troubleshooting by an overworked staff versus someone else fixing problems smoothly. A sliver of server space per person versus a five-gigabyte chunk. Half a million dollars versus free.

That's what colleges are faced with as they decide whether to continue running their own e-mail services or outsource them to a professional service like Google Apps Education Edition or Microsoft Live@edu.

It seems like a no-brainer. More than 1,000 colleges have signed up with those