A list released today by U.S. News & World Report highlights the nation’s 15 “most-wired campuses,” comparing each college’s student population to the number of computers on campus.
This is the first year that U.S. News has dedicated a list to the topic. In a survey of 1,700 undergraduate programs last year, 1,280 programs submitted data on their student populations and the number of computers on campus. U.S. News reported that the average computer-to-student ratio on campuses nationwide is 0.14—roughly seven students to one computer—but the top 15 institutions on the list tout computer-to-student ratios starting at 0.83.
Ringling College of Art and Design, in Florida, landed at the top of the list: The college’s 1,318 students have access to 2,500 computers, which is nearly two computers per student.
The publication’s methodology considered only the number of computers relative to the total student population, according to Brian Burnsed, a U.S. News education reporter.
But David Parry, an assistant professor of emerging media and communications at the University of Texas at Dallas, questions the list’s value. The computer-to-student ratio by “no means measures what’s really important,” he said. “It’s as if you were to say, ‘Let’s measure the strength of a university’s English program by counting the number of books in the library.’”
Measuring how students and professors use the computers would provide a more accurate picture of how “wired” a campus truly is, Mr. Parry said. Taking into account the amount of bandwidth a college uses, how many students own smartphones or laptops, and the ways instructors use technology in the classroom are better benchmarks than counting computers, he argued.
“Increasingly, ‘wiredness’ or visual literacy is moving away from desktop computing and into distributed computing, like smartphones and iPads,” Mr. Parry said. “If they aren’t taking that into account, they probably aren’t measuring the cutting edge.”
30 Responses to ‘U.S. News’ Highlights ‘Most Wired’ Campuses, but Some Question Methodology
aloshbaugh - February 10, 2011 at 9:35 am
How unbelievably asinine. US News has jumped the shark.
doublygifted - February 10, 2011 at 1:09 pm
As a tutor at the college level as well as an instructor of developmental writing and a private tutor for adult literacy, I agree with Dr. Parry. In my own experience, the more “distributed” the computing the more students, adult or child, can actually learn from them.
And with the enormous adult literacy threatening to cripple this country, it’s time we looked at the use of technology in vastly different ways that the rubric we used before to grade a school– based on the old standard “number of computers relative to the total student population” – And yet without college administrative support for these new ways of using computers, we won’t get anywhere.
The tools that are already developed and waiting to be fully utilized include Visual Thesaurus, Quizlet, Lumosity, GoogleDocs, Voice Thread, and a long list of others. All these tools can be used outside the traditional classroom.
USA Today has made money with their “lists of” for years. Their standard measuring stick for these lists when it comes to Greatest Cities to Live In, etc. has always been up for discussion. The critera for this list should be fuel for healthy discussion as well.
pkomarny - February 11, 2011 at 3:12 pm
I agree with Mr. Perry about the meaning of this report. To begin to understand what ‘wired’ means I feel that you must really look at how the university uses its technology resources in regards to teaching and learning.
We at Seton Hill University are monitoring how ‘wired’ we are in a very different way. With the launch of our new technology initiative, The Griffin Technology Advantage (http://www.setonhill.edu/techadvantage), that puts both an iPad and Mac Book Pro into the hands of all full-time students, one of the key performance indicators we have been monitoring is the usage of our network and its resources including internet bandwidth. We issued over 1800 iPads and 750 Mac Book Pros in the Fall of 2010 and we will be publishing a white paper that outlines the program from many aspects including these usage rates.
I feel that these types of reports give a better view of the use of technology and should be evaluated by incoming students. How many computers per student is a eye grabbing headline but how you use those computers is the real story.