College students are notorious for stuffing dorm rooms with every trinket, decoration and piece of technology possible. But one item they no longer bring: the traditional phone – the one with the cord.
As students arrive at college campuses toting cell phones, local university administrators are reconsidering the need for telephone systems in residence halls. And two universities are cutting the cord this year. Bryant University is in the process of removing phones for many of its residence halls. And starting in September, the University of Rhode Island will stop offering land-line phone service in its dorms.
“We were finding lots of students weren’t even plugging in,” URI Chief Information Officer Garry Bozylinsky said.
The university expects the elimination of phone service to save at least $600,000 annually. The school will pass the savings on to students in the form of lower fees.
Almost all those students come to college armed with their iPhones, BlackBerrys or other cellular communication devices. URI Vice President of Administration Robert Weygand said rarely does he spot a traditional land line phone in a residence hall.
Other administrators have also noticed the rapid move away from landline phones that colleges spent tens of thousands of dollars to install. Roger Williams University stopped providing the service in 2009 because of low usage. Rhode Island College is considering eliminating its residence hall phone service because so few students use it.
At Providence College, usage took a nosedive about four years ago said Carmine Piscopo, telecommunications manager. It was then that family plans and incentives such as free night and weekend calling led to cell phones springing up on campuses around the country.
The drop in usage caught many telecommunication managers off guard, said George Loftus, president and CEO of the Ocean State Higher Education Economic Development and Administrative Network.
A 2009 study by Ball State University found that 99 percent of college students carry a cell phone. For local universities, that translates to usage of land lines on a level barely noticeable. At Providence College, Piscopo estimates that just 3 percent to 5 percent of residential students use the dorm-room phones. Those that do use the phones mostly call the local pizza parlor or a professor rather than mom or dad. (They also have limited options as the university offers only local phone service.)
“The younger people today, when you tell them to make a phone call they reach for the cell phone,” Piscopo said.
Providence College, however, has no immediate plans to eliminate the dorm phone service. Piscopo said the college long ago paid off the system installed in 1994. The cost to maintain it, he said, is relatively minor. The university also wants to keep the phone numbers because the first digits match the campus’ other numbers. But Piscopo said if administrators start looking to pinch pennies, eliminating dorm-room phone service could become an option.
That’s because in a time of rising tuition costs, administrators are often seeking savings wherever they can.
Before deciding to remove phones, Bryant University converted its traditional phones to ones that use the same cabling that carries Internet traffic. Such systems, known as voice over IP, reduce costs and eliminate the need to string traditional telephone wire.
But Bryant found that limited use could not justify the costs. So workers have been removing the phones in rooms off suites and keeping just one in the common area. Those phones are primarily aimed for communicating emergency messages or for emergency calls.
The university also plans to install antennas to improve cell phone reception in residence halls with poor signals. Bozylinsky said the university wants to ensure students have convenient access to phones when the land lines go away.
“We don’t want a student to have to, at two in the morning in February, to have to go out and make a phone call because they don’t have service in their room,” Bozylinsky said.
The distributed antenna networks will carry an installation price. But Bozylinsky said reduced maintenance costs should easily offset them. Plus the university will also eliminate the price tag of installing a phone system in its new residence halls. When the university last installed voice over IP phone systems in three buildings it cost $250,000, Weygand said.
Wireless systems also present new ways for universities to communicate with their students. A few years ago, the University of Rhode Island rolled out a system that sends text messages and automated phone calls to student cell phones in the event of an emergency or school cancellation. Last year, Brown University released an application for the iPhone that allows users to search its library collection.
Weygand, from the University of Rhode Island, thinks the rise in wireless communication will edge out most of the wires on campus, whether they connect to the phones or computers. Even in his own office, Weygand keeps his computer connected to the school’s wireless network, rather than the wall jack a few feet away.
“My sense is that within five years no one will be using hard wires anymore,” Weygand said. •
