There's been talk for awhile now about college students not checking e-mail, instead preferring new technology like text messaging and Facebook.
Schools, in an understandably institutional response often now "require" students to check their email, making the process exciting to the students by calling it "official". I really do have sympathy for the institutions, especially the poor community college that has been fighting for 3 years to get the budgeting to get an .edu e-mail, finally gets one for 2 million, only to find students used it to get a Facebook account and now don't check their .edu at all, because they get all the info they think they need by logging into Facebook everyday.
While big rich universities like PSU can afford to live on the edge of technology, the bell curve of schools is being left behind by the spam filters of students.
Gen Y, or C, depending on who you are reading, is bombarded with media. (Just think of advertising on the 1/2 inch strip of trim above the glass backboards with www.godaddy.com on them.) They have had to erect incredible powerful filtration methods to sort through all the "junk" that comes at them all day.
E-mail as a mechanism, to a Gen-Yer, and to anyone that hasn't figured out their spam filter yet, is more junk that good. Too much viagra, sales pitches, "send this to ten people or else . . ". Students are simply de-emphasizing this channel in proportion to its usefulness to them.
It's hard to keep up with their preferences, for sure, but it's very silly for institutions to try to force them to use a channel that students have reviewed and dismissed. The students are simply making optimization choices for their inputs. They are making smart choices based on their experiences. Schools will not convince them they are wrong with policies, at best they will cow the students and thereby reinforce an "out of touch" reputation.
Students like text messaging and Facebook precisely for the reasons institutions struggle with them - they are hard to Spam. Of course institutions don't see their communications as Spam, neither does Coke or Expedia, but in the aggregate all of the messages that are not immediately relevant tick one point negative in the student's minds. With Facebook, and incidentally, screwing this up is why myspace will continue to degenerate, students get messages that come from pre-filtered sources: their friends. Same goes for text messages, though now spam is starting to creep into this medium too.
The start of an answer for schools is too work on relevancy. They must do the hard work of pre-filtering their communications and try to get it to the right students at the right time. Regardless of what channel the message goes through, if institutions lazily bomb out mass e-mails, this generation will simply tune them out with the other junk. Of course this is extra hard for schools with no technology, it is always easy to "send all".
My personal opinion is that PSU has it right. I think RSS feeds are the way to go. This is a scalable system and is free (sign up for a free typepad account and then feedburn it and you've got an RSS feed). The only challenge is that RSS feeder adoption rates are not yet high enough to make it work (in fact they are extremely low). Institutions could require these instead of -e-mail however, and avoid looking silly by spending money on ineffective channels or requiring outmoded technologies. Instead the risk is on RSS adoption in general, but at least this experiment doesn't put the IT department out 2 million. Very importantly, RSS gives the students a Spam free info channel allowing the institution to show off its understanding of the current challenges of its most important stake holders.
