Posted on: Tuesday, September 21, 2004

Struggling college wired into its future

By Justin Pope
Associated Press

BUCKHANNON, W.Va. — Small, poor and 45 minutes from the nearest town with a shopping mall, West Virginia Wesleyan College couldn't attract enough students to fill its classrooms and improve its struggling finances. To survive and thrive, it needed to stand out.

The answer, college leaders decided, was technology.

In the mid-1990s, the school of 1,550 students three hours south of Pittsburgh became one of the first and most aggressive members of the "ubiquitous computing" movement on college campuses. The idea was to get computers into the hands of every student virtually all the time, transforming living and learning.

While richer schools moved more cautiously, Wesleyan spent millions of dollars — some of it borrowed — wiring its campus with cutting-edge technology, training faculty to use it as a teaching tool and subsidizing a requirement that every student lease a laptop computer. The college even required prospective students to apply online.

For a school with an endowment of around $30 million, building a technology oasis in Appalachia wasn't just an experiment, it was a big gamble — one Wesleyan hoped would pay off by attracting more students, especially wealthier ones who wouldn't need financial aid.

Nearly a decade later, the results offer insights to other small schools about the benefits, and limits, of technology.

Since neither Wesleyan nor many students could afford all of this equipment outright, the college opted to charge a technology fee. The revenue would cover the college's general expenses, like network maintenance, plus provide each student with a leased IBM Think Pad laptop to be upgraded every two years and returned at graduation.

But as the fee grew to $1,200 annually, the college had to chip in more and more. On balance, the program cost the college several hundred thousand dollars per year.

This spring, Wesleyan announced it would cut the fee to $600, and require students to buy their own laptops from Dell.

About the same time, Wesleyan produced its first balanced budget in recent memory, though school officials insist the technology program didn't create the college's financial problems. They blame them instead on the tuition discounts the college must offer students to keep classes full.