The University of Virginia has begun a three-year process of
shutting down all of its public computer labs as part of an effort to
cut costs.

In an explanation
published on the university’s Web site, information-technology
officials say that students’ changing habits have rendered the public
labs obsolete. A survey conducted last fall revealed that 99 percent of
new students brought their own laptops to the campus. And while the
labs are still heavily used (students spent 651,900 hours in the labs
last year), internal data indicated that 95 percent of the time those
students used the lab computers to surf the Web and read and compose
text documents–tasks that officials say they could easily do on their
own computers. — Chronicle