The Kids May Yet Be Alright

Those crazy millennials! When given the opportunity to have all of the keenest tech at their fingertips in settings that wow every visiting dad who can picture himself watching the game on them, they seem to want...books!

Alia Wong, writing at The Atlantic, recounts how students seem to lean towards libraries that do things libraries have always done: Provide access to information and the curation of that information so as to be able to find what they need to learn things and finish assignments. In fact, some of the surveys and an increasing pile of research suggest that paper books help those tasks better than do e-books and journals. Actually I think you could make an end run around the electronic journal thing if you looked something up and then wrote it down in a notebook, giving yourself the benefit of physical text and note-taking.

As a licensed middle-aged grump, I of course prefer libraries with books in them and think wholesale commitment to whizbangery is very likely an expensive and trendy boondoggle. At the college where I used to work, I recall that when the new business school building opened, the university president touted it as one of the most technologically advanced facilities in the state, if not nation. When I've been in that building since then the cutting edge tech of 2004 is either painfully outdated or flat-out gone. The whetstone necessary to keep that edge cost a lot more than he thought it would.

Turns out that while college textbooks and academic journals are ridiculously expensive, they're ridiculously expensive only once -- rather than every other year. Good job, meddling kids.