University to Stop Issuing Email Accounts

By Michael Santo
Editor-in-Chief, RealTechNews

I’ve frequently harped on the fact that quite a few people have little if any common sense. Finally a college has realized what should have been obvious by now: most (all right, virtually all) incoming students have their own digital identities formed before reaching college. And they don’t really want, need or use a university-supplied email address.

Thus Boston College has made the decision to stop offering full email accounts to incoming students. They will offer forwarding. That makes sense, and I use the same thing on my personal email account. I have it forward everything to my Gmail account, filtered into a subfolder.

What this means is that a student might be given the address x@bc.edu, but any email sent there would be forwarded to say, x@gmail.com, once the student sets it up.

Mary C. Corcoran, associate vice president for user and support services at BC said:

“Students weren’t really using the Boston College accounts as much as we would like them to. It just becomes one more thing for them to check because their life is somewhere else.”

While BC looked into outsourcing their e-mail to Google or to Microsoft, which offer such services free to colleges and universities, as other campuses have, they decided against signing such a deal. Corcoran said:

“We heard that the contracts were incredibly difficult to negotiate. Some colleges were in negotiations for a couple of years. At some point, who knows, they could start charging us.”

Let’s be honest, with setups like Gmail, as well, where you can tailor a response that comes in from a different account to be sent as though it came from that account, who needs something else?

This is probably a good decision; while Corcoran said she knows of no other learning institution doing this, perhaps it’s time for others to think about it.