Most colleges invest in technology to increase students’ learning success, prepare students for the real world and to keep up with evolving curricula in 2015.
However, I think there might be more cut-throat motives at play whenever a college opens its wallet for technology– to put butts in seats and stay king of the college mountain.
This makes sense, of course – colleges need to make money to pay professors and energy bills, fund programs, and stay afloat.
However, I think sometimes colleges see too much green when it comes to investing in technology or new campus spaces.
Take college sports for instance: schools like UMass Amherst, the University of Oregon, Michigan State University invested millions of dollars to make their sports teams light up with technology, and give them beautiful new facilities to practice stomping competitors.
Plus, each school emptied their piggy banks so their new technological toys can serve as a juicy carrot for prospective students to reach for.
Also reasonable – what high school senior wouldn’t want to go to a school with a brand-spanking new training facility and video walls to flash their names, player numbers and stats to the whole school?
Then there are schools like Boston College, which invested in NFL-sized video boards to pull fans out of their living rooms and put them in the stands to visually engage with the football team.
The video boards also set Boston College apart from any other college in the northeast, since no other school in that part of the country has 19×54 foot video boards for its athletes.
But while these technologies are incredible, I wonder how necessary they are.
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