Undergrad Student Tech Survey

“Tablets are in, computer labs are out, and the cloud is the new hard drive — these are the interwoven threads upon which college students are hoisting  themselves into the future of campus computing. So say technology futurists,  those whisperers who strive to interpret for the rest of us the inscrutable “digital natives” who now roam undergraduate campuses. But new data from Student Monitor, a market research firm that tracks actual  consumer trends among traditional-age college students at four-year  institutions, unravels those threads a bit. As it turns out, students appear  more likely to store data on their local devices and networks, and to use  college-owned computers, than they are to save documents in the cloud and eschew  communal machines entirely in favor of their own.”

“The responses to the fall survey, which is not freely available, came from “one-on-one intercepts” of 1,200 first-time, full-time undergrads on 100  campuses in October.”

1. “Just over half of respondents (51 percent) said they use  college-owned computers at least “a few times a week,” with nearly a quarter  saying they use the communal machines at least once every day. Only 15 percent  said they never use school-owned computers. This despite 95 percent saying they  have a computer of their own, and 29 percent saying they own two.”

2. “Three of the top four devices students  report owning are flash drives (66 percent), printers (62 percent), and digital  cameras (55 percent) — devices that are said to be obsolescent in an age when  synchronized cloud storage, electronic submission of papers and projects, and  picture-taking smartphones are mainstream.”

3. “The venerable, relatively unhip Microsoft Word, meanwhile, was rated the most  frequently used software application by far, easily outpacing the cloud-based  Google Docs and the open-source OpenOffice suite. ”

4.  “Tablet computers do not yet pose a threat to displace laptops as the  prevailing device among college students. Asked to name the type of computer  they use most often, 86 percent said a laptop; only 2 percent said a tablet.  Only 5 percent of respondents said they owned both, and only 1 percent said they  owned a tablet only.”

5.  “98 percent said they  regularly spent time on Facebook, with an average time of four hours per  week.  Three-quarters said they used Twitter, sinking an average of just  over an hour and a half per week. MySpace, which has been hemorrhaging users for  the last half-decade or so, still managed to grab the attention of 63 percent of  students for an hour or so each week.”

There you go! Students are still pretty conservative in their tech choices and you’re probaboly more up to date.

Stephen