Switched has a new home! Huffpost Tech.

Click here to visit the new home of Switched!

Hot on HuffPost Tech:

See More Stories
AOL Tech

University of Kentucky Ditching Land Lines for Cell Phones

by Tim Stevens on September 12, 2008 at 09:02 AM

http://www.uky.edu/uksb07/assets/background.jpgIt's hard to find similarities across any random selection of college students, with each having different backgrounds, goals, and preferred alcoholic beverages. There is, however, one commonality: cell phones. A study at the University of Kentucky recently found that 98.2-percent of UK students had cell phones that they relied on for their primary means of communication, findings that have spurred the school to ditch land-lines in dorms, a move that will save the school $840,000-per-year.

Land-lines are being deactivated at a savings of $25-per-student. This is money that will offset rising heating costs this year, meaning room and board fees will not increase as they otherwise would have. Students do have the option of having their lines enabled, but so far only seven out of 5,600 students living in on-campus housing have suffered the shame of doing so. In case of emergency, UK has a system that can contact students on their cell phones just as easily as land-lines, meaning everybody wins and everyone is safe -- except for old-school phone companies that haven't gotten with the times yet. [From: nky.com]

Tags: btsnews, cell phones, CellPhones, college, dorm, emergency text messaging, EmergencyTextMessaging, students, uk, university of kentucky, UniversityOfKentucky

HuffPost AOL Social News Most Popular