The death of the computer lab

When I was in college, I spent many a long hour in the computer lab, working on my COBOL, Pascal or -- yikes -- Assembly language programs for computer science classes. The only other option: Working on my hulking desktop at home via dialup, and even then certain things I had to do to complete assignments just weren't possible unless I trekked into the lab.

Nowadays that's completely changed. Not only has the need for VAX connectivity has waned considerably, everyone has a laptop they can use not just from home but from anywhere on campus, thanks to nearly ubiquitious Wi-Fi access on most universities.

And that has many cash-strapped colleges wondering why they're spending money on electricity, personnel, and equipment to keep vast computer labs up and running.

The University of Virginia -- which is now dismantling its computer labs -- has some telling statistics, saying that of the 3,117 freshman entering the university's IT and Communication department in 2007, 3,113 of them already owned their own computer, nearly all of them laptops.

Surprisingly, many students continued to use the labs despite having access to their own PCs, but many of them were running free apps like web browsers while they hung out there, not using specialized and expensive software they couldn't otherwise run at home. This suggests the labs were used mainly as ways to kill time between classes when students didn't want to bother breaking out their laptop or trekking back to the dorm room.

Shutting down its computer labs will save the school about $300,000 a year. But what about the future of the rooms in which the labs were based? The plan at Virginia is to convert them into meeting rooms for students to work on projects in a group atmosphere. Only now it's BYOPC.