Forbes is carrying the Princeton Review’s Most Connected Campuses
feature. The survey, “examines the technological capabilities of the country's best schools and tells you which 25 campuses are the closest to the cutting edge.� There were two things that struck me about these results.
First, the bar for being “connected� seems pretty low – it doesn’t offer much beyond what a tech-savvy person would expect to find in Arlington, VA, for example. The full methodology is explained in the accompanying article, but the gist of it is:
Some of the more heavily weighted factors include whether a campuswide network is in place; whether the school has a wireless network; whether a school streams audio or video of its courses online; whether students can take classes that occur entirely online; and the percentage of undergraduates who own computers.
It seems that a wired campus has become a sales/marketing tool to lure undergraduates, because, as the article says, “today's colleges have to provide high-tech tools in order to attract the best applicants.� Hmmm. The second odd thing about this list is that out of a list of 25 schools, more than half (14) were in Pennsylvania (7) or New York (7). What’s that about? Yes, MIT is on the list, but so are Duquesne University, a Catholic college in downtown Pittsburgh, and Marist College, in Poughkeepsie, NY.
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