The only problem with this is that students change their personal e-mail address on a whim. It's nearly impossible to keep up with the changes. The better solution is to allow students to port their college e-mail to their private e-mail.

And do you really want your institution of higher learning to email students at personal email addresses like "really drunk dude@hotmail.com" or "sassy B*tch@gmail.com"?

If students forward their academic email addresses it means double the spam, and if we take away this address when they graduate, we have lost a major inexpensive established way to communicate with alumni. Some universities are outsourcing email to vendors like google in which your school name and "edu" address is the same but the student can keep it forever. This is also being offered to alumni. However, many future students do not use regular email anymore and use facebook - no spam!

We tell students they have to check their campus email accounts for official information being disseminated among the masses, such as charges to the student account for overdue notices at the library. When they don't pay up, we ask why not and typically, the answer is: "I didn't know about it." Again, "why not?" nets an answer of "no one told me." "Didn't you check your email?" yields some very interesting answers, the most common of which is "I never check my school email - only my Gmail account." Because the only email in their school account is occasional bills and spam. Their real email goes to their personal account(s). They have no incentive to go look at an account that isn't active 90% of the time. And like someone else said, if they're not going to be able to keep the account as long as they want (post-graduation), why bother forming attachments to it by giving the address to friends or relatives?

Perhaps the best solution is a hybrid: give us your email address or we'll give you one that is yours to keep?

I have yet to meet an email system this decade that didn't have some sort of forwarding system available so I could see what was coming in to my official account without having to actually remember to go in and check it every so often. So even if students prefer to be assigned an email address rather than give their personal address to the university, they can still radiate email to their personal accounts via the school's forwarding system, or through certain web-based email's ability to grab email from another account and bring it in. There are ways of making this work if people really sit down to consider student emailing behavior. Not all, not even most, students have abandoned email for Facebook.

Another truth is, most people keep email addresses for a long time, but after a while, spam forces us to seek out a new address. Plus, invariably, life will finally teach us that reallydrunkdud@hotmail isn't exactly the best choice of monikers, especially when preparing to enter the job market (something a Facebook account probably won't help with in the communication department either). The population on college campuses makes it daunting to keep up with the various changes, I'll admit, but I promise that keeping up with email changes aren't nearly as bad as keeping up with address changes or phone changes before everyone had cell phones.

(Try sending a letter to a student who is staying in one of your campus buildings but is trying to hide it! "Is this the right address for you?" "Oh yes." "But we keep getting it back." "That's the correct address..." "Okay..." (The next student in line says "next time, address it to him in the third floor study carrel 12." We finally resorted to verbal communications. Phone changes are still an issue, but I'll bet the changes have cut down by at least 1/3 since people have started coming to school with their phones from home.)

P.S. Our homeless student graduated without being forced out of his "home." I assume he's moved on to bigger and better things by now.

We decided that we would use whatever email account students prefer--and almost none of them chose to use their "official" college accounts. So we stopped giving student college email accounts automatically--we only created them on request. And we had very few requests--around a dozen out of a class of 400.

Then this year, after multiple requests over the years, Facebook created a "network" for our school. In order to join the Facebook network, students needed to have an official college email address (Facebook's rule, not ours). So requests for college email addresses jumped from 12 to over 200, and they're still coming in.

Colleges may decide not to require or provide official email addresses, but if the services students really want (Facebook, academic discounts on software, etc.) require that "edu" address, students are going to keep wanting to have that--even if they don't really use it for much else.

An institutional email should be used by graduate students and post-docs. This is a committment to their educational institution. As #2 Bertub pointed out do you really want your student putting down email addresses like "really drunk dude@hotmail.com" on serious peer-revewed papers or on conference posters? You and your student would look like proper asses. It is important for graduate students and post-docs to be treated and to behave as colleagues attached to an institution.
Like mail you have a home address and a work address.

We supply students with email addresses & have just moved to a Gmail provided system; which, as others have said, lasts for life (of the student/Gmail I guess!)

I was, however, beginning to be swayed by the points that others have made re. allowing students to use their own email addresses (and using that, in part, as a teaching point about appropriateness of user IDs...) Till I read the point about the need for an academic one to get student discounts. I'd forgotten about that, though I often point students to sites that require it!
I have also felt in the past that once in the work place employees are expected to use a work based email for work based communication - so academic ones are a way of starting to get into the habit.

I don't suppose there is a "right" answer - yes, students can forward - but if they then answer from drunkdude@hotmail & you ignore it/ the spam filters munch it before you can ignore it; then there's a breakdown in communication. Equally, when they don't forward & don't check - there's also a breakdown in communication.

Well, we're still sorting through all the issues created by switching to a Google-hosted email system. Very few of our students check their school-supplied email accounts unless they're in a course where that is a major means of communication. Auto-forwarding doesn't show up on the normal reports as activity, so it is difficult to determine if the account is being used. And have you ever tried to configure an email client to access a Gmail account? It isn't obvious, and it isn't obvious to the student that he has to go to Google to find the instructions for how to do it. Or get into the help desk queue for this and a hundred other issues. Now that I'm on the email policy committee, I'm more inclined to using (within reason) whatever is the student's preferred email address.

We allow students to to port their college e-mail to their private e-mail. The big problem with that Google, Hotmail, or other services often think university e-mail is spam, so our students have trouble getting messages from professors, other students, administrators, etc....

Dear trtudor,
As an alum, sending me email doesn't make me feel any more connected to the institution. Meeting my interests does. I get emails from my college and most of it is trash. Allowing me to watch archived videos of guest speakers, that would be cool.

I'd much prefer to use the student email address of his/her choice, but problems with spam filters have resulted in too many messages being blocked or lost. The only way the university & library can say with any certainty that students are receiving our notifications is to assign them email addresses, and make it their responsibility to check the university account. This way students can't claim that they didn't receive a recall message, for example, and the fact that they didn't check their university account doesn't fly as a means of avoiding penalties. It's far from ideal. If we could work more easily with big email providers to ensure that mail from our servers was not discarded as spam, then we could rely on personal accounts. I'm sure that most students would prefer this approach.

There are major FERPA issues with sending "educational record" information (including advising information, grades, scores, GPAs, financial aid, etc.)via email for which the university does not control the password assignment.

I agree with emmadw. We are not only training students (who are adults) in a field of knowledge but we are also training them for life. I do not think that any employer is going to accept one of our graduates excuse of "I didn't know about ____ because I never check my work email." I have a feeling that would go over like a lead balloon. We need students to learn that it is their responsibility to get their education and no one is going to coddle them. At the same time, spamming our students with emails from every club and organization on campus is not helpful either. There needs to be a way for students to "Opt-in" or Opt-out" of fluff/spam emails from campus clubs and such.

An overlooked area here is the interests of the Advancement/Alumni folks, who are often strongly interested in the concept of providing a free "e-mail for life" on the premise that it will help them keep track of alums (read: potential donors). Is there research that indicates the return on investment in the form of donation changes by virtue of keeping close track of alums, sending them e-newsletters, and providing e-mail, in spite of the cost?

Our students rarely if ever use their school accounts. It's not just because they forget or they change their personal accounts often. It's also because the school's email systems usually SUCK. I can certainly attest to that fact with my grad school email system. I could never get attachments to work properly, and my instructors rarely used the school's email system for that same reason. Especially given that the school is an ART school -- students and faculty are CONSTANTLY needing to send image files, Flash movies, PowerPoint presentations, etc. Even Gmail and Hotmail handles them better than any college system I've ever used. One time early in my grad program, after I'd moved to a new apartment, I simply went into my student account and changed my default email address to my personal email account while I was changing my mailing address. Problem solved. Now I get alumni emails -- it was a win-win decision that I only had to make ONCE.

PeopleSoft is pretty common amongst colleges (for everything from student/faculty/admin. emails to registering for classes online to financial aid to the college's internal admin. functions), and it doesn't do ANYTHING very well in any arena.

So what if the student has a dumb-ass, ridiculous personal email address? Most emails sent to students are done through a "blast" to students from the school via some database report informing large groups of students of things they need to know about or take care of. It's rarely ever used for anything else more personal than communication with individual instructors.

As soon as our students graduate, EVEN IF they ever used their school email address, they abandon it. FaceBook and LinkedIn are the only semi-reliable ways for us to keep track of them, and they both work pretty well. The school email is almost always the first to go extinct.

Most people have their professional email accounts and personal email accounts. Why not let students keep their college account as their official communication link with their alma mater. There is a certain exclusivity to having a .edu account. Just make sure it is easy for students to forward their email to their personal accounts. It is a minor expense when compared to the long term value of deepening their committment/support of the institution.

I took my first class on a college campus in 1980. I remember when colleges/universities actually used postal mail to mail out grades, important information, etc. I find it most interesting that after nearly 3 decades of exponential increases in tuition, schools are now loathe to use postal mail for really important information dissemination. Maybe all the money saved on using email instead of postal mail could be used to roll back some of those exhorbitant tuition increases.

No one should be entitled to an e-mail account in the first place, paying student/alumni or not.

Portals, portals, portals! This is the next evoluationary step...until something better replaces it.

@laoshi:
Entitled? Believe me, that's not what that's about. The students don't care one iota whether the school gives them an email account and the graduates of said school mostly don't care if they get to keep said email account because they never used said email account. School email accounts are about making administration easier on the administrators. But to the poster who complained about FERPA violations, I have one word for you: Blackboard. Grades, Scores, GPA information, financial aid, all in one convenient location, under one password, that has very little to do with an unsecured email system (because even if you control the password system, it's still easy to hack). Time to start pressuring your admins for a new course-management system.