Plenty of American colleges now tell freshmen they must bring laptops to campus, but a growing number of Chinese institutions are doing just the opposite: They’re prohibiting first-year students from having computers of their own.
Nanjing, Zhejiang, and Shanghai Jiaotong Universities have all recently enacted computer bans aimed at preventing freshmen from becoming addicted to Web surfing or computer-game playing, according to the Beijing News. The idea, apparently, is that first-year students don’t have much self-control: Once they become sophomores, they’re allowed to buy machines.
It’s worth noting that some of the institutions actually boast impressive technology programs. A team of students from Shanghai Jiaotong, for example, took first prize in the Association for Computing Machinery’s 2005 International Collegiate Programming Contest — an event considered by many to be the Olympics of undergraduate computer science. —Brock Read
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