GraniteGrok

Whether you like it or not.  Not only that, but they will be making a profit on this as well.  It used to be, back in the Stone Age, I had to rent my landline in the dorm from BU...and they profited from it.  Now, the 'Grok College Student's Dad reports that the landlines are kaput, but that you HAVE to rent the minifridge/microwave unit from BU. 

Always another way to find a revenue stream, eh?  

There are various phone and call plan options, but the bottom line is you have to pick one. That could be a problem for someone with their own cell phone and their own monthly bill.

"If you're mobile accessing the campus from anywhere with some device that's attached to your hip, the truth of the matter is, you're also avoiding a lot of costs," said Ed Chapel, Montclair State vice president of information technology.

Sure, so much for competing in the open marketplace, right? And Mr. Chapel should know better than to speak that crapola.  Kids have got laptops and cell phones and Crackberries - the mode in which they access the campus 'net should not depend on a single mandatory device that is only obtainable from the campus money mavens - especially at a publicly funded one! 

I like what this guy had to say (and I have reformatted it just a tad, with emphasis):

Successful business marketing, as taught at Montclair State University:

Garner a captive audience, establish a monopoly on sale of the product, fix the price, require the purchase as a condition of attendance at school, collect the use fees even if the product isn't used. And, just to be on the cutting edge of contemporary sales, promote the product as a defense against terrorism, a hedge against campus violence.

"Frankly, I think it's a scam," says Gennaro Esposito, 20, a senior.

He is talking about how the public university's officials require students to purchase a cell phone and an accompanying service from them.  Through them actually. The service is Sprint/Nextel, with added gizmos provided by Rave Wireless, a company specializing in attracting a college audience.  At $552 a year with only limited use off-campus. Limited -- 50 minutes a month.

"I never use it," says Christine Kadets, a junior. "I leave it home. It would cost me more money to get out of my family plan."

Of course, some low-income students might not have to pay for the phones. In those cases, you have to pay for them -- through taxes for financial aid.

"It might be a good idea, but it should be voluntary," says Nicole Van Voorhis, a 22-year-old senior.

As Rush says "Young skulls full of mush" but these kids have got the wherewithal to know when they're being ripped off (or the taxpayers of NJ).  Now I have no problem with Rave Wireless, a for profit company trying to make said profit.  The problem I have is making it mandatory by a tax funded entity.  Remember I talked about landlines above?  Believe me, I wrote that BEFORE I saw this: 

Karen Pennington, the university vice president for student affairs, said the school got into the cell phone business for a variety of reasons. One was the collapse of a market for land phones in dorms, because many students had their own cell phones.

Right....such spin!  Again - landlines are fixed, sunk costs - and used to be quite profitable.  And they got caught flatfooted with a change in technology.  Universities could demand a premium for them as there could be no competition with the outside-the-dormroom world.  Cell phones offered no such hiding place for profit gathering....

"If we took the phones out of the dorms, then students would have no way to communicate in an emergency," she says.

What a crock!  Or, what a crock???  They still make payphones - put one in at every floor if you are that concerned with that safety need.  Or, just reiterating what you just said - since everybody's got one, somebody will have one handy, right?  Go ahead - I dare Ms. Pennington to come up with a scenario in which a cell phone would not work but a landline would (other than a single cell phone situation and the battery dies - then I can think of a scenario where the wall mounted landline cannot be reached to counter it). 

Another was the desire to provide cutting edge communication tools to students. The next step after the now-accepted practice of requiring students to buy laptop computers.

The phones Montclair students must purchase -- there is no requirement to use them, says Pennington -- do have all sorts of features just ordinary phones don't have:

• You can be alerted when the campus shuttle bus is about to arrive at a stop so you don't have to wait outside in the cold.
• You can push a button right there in class to tell your prof you don't understand a concept -- that's called instant polling.
• You can keep up with your assignments through a feature known as "Blackboard" that holds your syllabus and messages from faculty members.
• And, of course, the safety features.
• Instant warnings if something bad is happening on campus. At other schools -- Kean and Princeton, for example -- students can register their cell phones and e-mails and receive instant alerts in case of trouble.

For free.

No, it's not free - you paid for it (or a taxpayer did).  And consider this - a cell phone nowadays is merely a computer with a transciever builtin.  Whatever that phone is doing was created by a programmer....which means the same signals from their mandatory phone could be duplicated by a programmer with another one.....

Hey, a new market place idea - just reverse engineer it, set it up on iTunes, and sell to to kids that already have their own phones.  Then sue the University to open access their 'Net to all students.

After all, Verizon is going to do the same thing! 

But this new phone has a built-in GPS device that can track you, say, if you're walking from a classroom building to your car at night. If you don't arrive at your car at a prescribed time, the campus police are notified and they come looking for you.

Note: this was mandated a while ago for 911 calls (to be GPS aware)....this has been around for a while and is not a big technical deal anymore..... 

That GPS function troubles Esposito, as aspiring lawyer. "Somehow, I don't think I would want people to know where I am all the time," he says.

Some students rave about the phone. Ron Chicken, a junior and president of the Student Government Association, says, "It's great -- I love it.

"It really goes far in creating a sense of community at the college," says Chicken. "And it has so many features."

But even Chicken says he believes the program should be voluntary.

This like the politican chuckleheads in California.  What do you hear out there?  Stop driving the pollution creating cars?  So, they did....and gas tax revenues dropped.  Now, they want to have folks GPS their cars so they can collect the taxes based on mileage.

It's bad enough that I use a EZ-Pass RFID to pay the tolls - it also allows government to see where's I've been.  But to give them access to all the places I'm at?  At the present moment, I'm replaying all of the spy/ SF / action movies in my head where the tracking device is found by a character and thrown into a truck going the other way....Problem is, I have to pay for that tracking unit in the first place!!!

Pennington says making it voluntary would defeat the academic "polling" features of the system and create a problem with dorm students who have no phones at all.

And strip away a source of profit too!  I just cannot wait for some CS / EE student to hack open the interface and plug it in with an iPhone, or set up a Java app on another phone type..... And didn't the article say that, just like the Miranda Act "and one will be provided to you at no charge".  Such sophistry!