College offers iPhones to incoming freshmen

Back when I was a freshman, we were lucky if our rooms had cable TV hookups and, er, running water. Nowadays, forking over tens of thousands of dollars a year not only gets you an education, but also—in the case of the almost 5,000 student Abilene Christian University—your own iPhone or iPod touch.

The program aims to make technology a pervasive part of the students’ every day life, by allowing them to receiving homework assignments, check their meal and account balances, and participate in in-class surveys on the devices. The university’s technology professionals have already created over fifteen different web apps handling those and other tasks. To show off their vision, they’ve also created a movie called Connected which imagines what a day in the life of a, well, connected university might look like.

The university’s CIO, Kevin Roberts was invited to Cupertino to demo Abilene’s program for Apple execs as well as higher education reps from the likes of Harvard, Yale, MIT, and Duke. This isn’t the first program of its kind—Duke University has in the past handed out iPods to incoming classes—but it is the first to make use of the iPhone and iPod touch’s network capabilities.

Heck, I was happy just to have Ethernet back in my college days. I can imagine a number of high school seniors reevaluating their enrollment decisions right about now…

Category: News

Posted by Dan Moren on Feb 26 2008, 3:42 PM ET

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