Student Union

PRESIDENT-ELECT JEFF NELSON:

Good afternoon—

Today I want to talk about improving student email by outsourcing it to Google Apps for Education.

Our University spends over a quarter million dollars every year to provide email accounts to students, faculty, and staff. Now, when you consider how much money is actually generated from tuition, a quarter million dollars may not seem like much. But if you realize that over the course of your undergraduate experience, the University will spend one million dollars to give you and your peers email accounts, the numbers begin to tell a very different story. Especially when you ask yourself if you've gotten your money's worth

The majority of student email accounts come with a limited 500 megabytes of storage space, no integrated calendar or document repository, and a slow, unreliable and unintuitive web interface like Squirrelmail.

Is Squirrelmail really worth all the money that we pay? Personally, I don't think it is.

We have an opportunity to both save money and improve student email at the same time. Schools like Northwestern, University of Virginia, SLU and Vanderbilt all use Google Apps to provide online student services. Wash. U. should do the same thing.

Google Apps is an online collaboration suite, and it will allow the University to provide each student with an email account that has an @wustl.edu address. Each account will come with 7 gigabytes of storage space, an integrated calendar, document repository and a global address book. These features would make collaboration and communication among students more user-friendly and seamless.

So, what is the price of Google Apps? Well, it's free!

Using Google Apps will allow us to save money and invest in other places that need more financial resources. Imagine what the University could do with an extra quarter million dollars every year. We could strengthen cell phone reception in the DUC, or we could establish an office for the prevention of sexual assault.

If we start now, we can to use Google Apps by the fall semester.

Let's make it happen.

Please take 1 minute and visit su.wustl.edu/GoogleAppsNow to sign our petition to the Administration. With your help, we can let them know that students want improved email and we want it now.

Thank you for watching. And good luck catching up on all school work that you need to do. Have a good day.

Attachment: 

15 March 09 Improving Student Email.pdf