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Some colleges give their incoming freshmen welcome kits with toiletries and coupons. Waldorf College, Forest City, Iowa, gives students IBM laptop computers with access to the Internet and e-mail. These days, schools need more than quality teachers and a nice campus. Sharp students are looking for cutting edge equipment and programs that are compatible with the work world they soon will enter. For Waldorf, the decision to become a laptop college came a year ago.
John Sorenson, academic dean, sees mobile computing as the wave of the
future. Instead of allowing those who could afford the technology to
leap ahead of those who could not, the school decided to level the
playing field with computers for all first-year students. Annual
tuition increased (from $9,600 to $10,575), Sorenson said, in part to
cover some of the computer costs. But the hike is comparable to
increases across Evangelical Lutheran Church in America colleges and
universities.
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