College Students: Changing Tech Landscape

Amherst College's director of IT, Peter Schilling, posted some interesting stats on the changing landscape of college students' proliferation and integration of technology and life, and their brand leanings (good news for Apple).

I've highlighted some of my personal favorite findings, but the full list can be found here. My comments in red.

What will be interesting to see is how organizations will adapt to and harness the creativity and tendency toward digital collaboration and mobility natural to digital natives, as our PR agency in Europe (LEWIS PR) likes to say.

1. By the end of August 2008 the total number of members and posts at the Amherst College Class of 2012 Facebook group: 432 members and 3,225 posts. Let's hope those posts don't come back to haunt the students.
   
2. Students in the class of 2012 who registered computers, IPhones, game consoles, etc. on the campus network by the end of the day on August 24th, the day they moved into their dorm rooms: 370 students registered 443 devices. So much for using the hard-earned college fund wisely.
   
3. Number of students in the class of 2012 who brought desktop computers to campus: 14. Who uses desktops?
   
4. Number that brought iPhones/iTouches: 93. Seems like a low number out of 370 students.
   
5. Likelihood that a student with an iPhone/iTouch is in the class of 2012: approximately 1 in 2. Sounds about right -- maybe low.
   
6. Total number of students on campus this year that have landline phone service: 5.Wonder 5 factors in Skype, VoIP and the like.
   
7. Mac or PC? Of the four classes currently on campus the classes of 2009 and 2010 are more likely to own Windows, while the classes of 2011 and 2012 are more likely to own Macs. While Macs will make some inroad into enterprises, I struggle to see this personal choice influencing on a grand scale enterprise migration from PCs.
   
8. The number of individual film titles in the College’s digital video streaming collection: 1,260.
9. Average number of emails received per day: 180,000. Amazing.
   
10. Percentage of email that arrives on campus that is spam: 94%. Disgusting.
    
11. Percentage of storage space taken up by email, a system designed to send brief text messages, that is actually taken up the files attached to the emails: 95%.
12. Increase in the total number of College-owned computers in use on campus from 2005 to 2008: 413 for a 2008 total of 1,308.
13. Total number of calls and emails to the IT Help Desk in 2007: 8,650. Wow. For a computer literate generation this surprised me.
    
14. Average time required to close a help-desk ticket: 39 minutes.
15. Based on the first 9 months of 2008, estimated percentage increase in help-desk tickets in 2008 over 2007: 11% (or 15.6 weeks of work for a staff member).