After Gmail adoption, some college students aren’t making the switch


Seventy percent of Brown students were already forwarding school eMails to their personal Gmail accounts.

Gmail is unquestionably popular with college students, but IT staffers on some Google-friendly campuses have had to formulate carefully crafted public relations campaigns to get students to make the transition from their school’s legacy eMail system to their brand-new Google inboxes.

Students have been a driving force behind the widespread adoption of Google’s eMail system – the most popular outsourced eMail option among U.S. colleges and universities – so for students to delay their conversion to a university-issued Gmail account has proven baffling in higher education.

Some campus technology decision makers say many students have become so comfortable with forwarding their school-related eMails to their personal Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo! accounts that they ignore consistent pleas from campus technology departments to make the change.

Students on college campuses that recently switched to Gmail worry about making the change and losing critically important eMails and eMail attachments in their old university inbox.

Whatever the issue, colleges and universities have seen a spate of early adopters – students who make the switch to Gmail within days, or even hours, of its availability – while large portions of the student population lags behind.

“Some [students] simply prefer to keep that system in place because it’s what they are used to and it works for them,” said Rita Girardi, a communications specialist for the University of Michigan’s Google Project Team, which coordinated a campus-wide effort to convince students to transition to the school’s Gmail system. “We’re really not surprised and anticipate that we’ll have a segment of the student population that won’t feel the need to migrate their current information, most likely because many of them already forward their [university] eMail to a personal account.”

Hundreds of colleges and universities have adopted Gmail platforms since 2007, including some of America’s most prestigious campuses. Google touted last fall that 61 of U.S. News and World Report’s Top 100 colleges used Gmail as their official eMail system. Yale, Brown, Northwestern, and Boston universities are among the schools giving Gmail accounts to students and faculty.

At UM, the push to switch eMail accounts began with the creation of a student advisory committee that drew up outreach strategies for campus technologists. On March 5, UM unveiled an online tool that allowed students, faculty, and staff members to move their eMail and contacts from the traditional UMICH eMail platform to Gmail.

Two weeks later, about 6,000 of UM’s 42,000 students had used the online tool to transfer their eMail accounts. Students have until August to complete the eMail migration.

“We anticipated an initial surge of early adopters, and that there would be a slow, steady build in adoption rates as news of the ability to move over to Google spread virally among the student population,” Girardi said.

UM’s Google Project team was also charged with creating a Student Google Guide distributed across campus, and promoting the Gmail switch on the university’s official TV station, Wolverine TV, and its student newspaper, the Michigan Daily.

Girardi said the first Gmail reminders were sent via eMail in February, and would continue once a month.

Stephanie Obadda, a communications and computer education manager at Brown University, said the school’s migration to Gmail in 2010 and 2011 hinged in part on helping students and faculty members better understand the switch, and removing lingering fears of devastating eMail loss.

Brown dispatched “early adopters” of the university’s Gmail platform to discuss the eMail transfer with fretful campus community members.

“Often early adopters become powerful advocates of the new system and are reassuring to others who are hesitant to jump on board,” Obadda said.

Seven in 10 Brown students forwarded their school-related eMails to their personal Gmail accounts before the university announced in July 2010 that the campus would outsource its eMail to Google, Obadda said. Brown’s IT department introduced a site, Training.Brown.edu, which listed workshops for new Gmail users.

Brown IT officials didn’t want to transfer eMail on a person-by-person basis, but rather department by department, “really taking time to understand the ways they were using eMail and calendaring and how that would translate to the new system,” Obadda said.

“It’s always difficult to pick the perfect time for a change like this – at a university, there’s always something important on the calendar,” she said, adding that any eMail data loss could be easily recovered because Brown’s old eMail servers haven’t been “retired.” “If there had been any problems, we could have easily accessed and re-migrated their old mail.”

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