There’s been a ton of activity on the blogosphere lately about Information Technology Director Peter Schilling’s newly created IT Index, posted at Academic Commons and blogged originally by The Chronicle of Higher Education.  There’s some pretty interesting information; 5 land lines left on campus, 14 desktop computers among the freshman class, more Macs than PCs for the classes of ‘11 and ‘12, etc.

Of course, the Chronicle - I’m going to blame it on them, and not Dr. Schilling - messes some pretty basic stuff up.  Let’s take a closer look:

And if it seems like every freshman on your campus owns a laptop and has a Facebook account, you might not be hallucinating—at least not at Amherst College, where 432 out of 438 freshmen had joined the “Amherst College Class of 2012” Facebook group by the end of August.

It’s obvious that the people writing this article do not have Facebook accounts, or else they would not be fooled by this flawed statistic.  Whereas the Facebook group for the Class of 2010 (my class) was closed to people solely in the Amherst network, the 2012 group was created before pre-frosh had email accounts at Amherst.  Thus, it was created as an open group that anyone could join and so it has stayed since.  A brief glance at the group shows members representing DormNoise.com, Campus Bedding, and some people that probably ended up at Williams.  Hey, even our Film Critic Woody Brown ‘11 is a member.  Creep.  Look, I’m splitting hairs here, but my point stands.  Don’t spew garbage that there are exactly 6 people in the class of 2012 not in the Facebook Group.

What else is suspect in this article?  How about this:

For example, of those 438 freshmen, 93 have registered iPhones or iTouches to the campus network.

Maybe - it’s hard to tell just by the survey, however.  I wouldn’t be surpised if this was the total for the entire campus.  Only Dr. Schilling knows for sure.  But this also seems strange:

In fact, Mr. Schilling says he checks the social-networking site on a regular basis. “Students actually talk a lot about their needs there instead of actually coming to us,” he says.

Pre-frosh activity on Facebook was insane.  But the 1st rule of Pre-frosh groups is that they become ghost groups as soon as students get on campus.  There have been less than 10 posts since orientation, and the majority of those have been spam or advertisements.  So I can’t imagine that Dr. Schilling continues to check it regularly.

Aside from these minor quibbles, however, it is striking to see how wired (rather, wireless) campus is these days.  Moral of the story: I want an iPhone.

UPDATE: Woody points out that Apple’s student promo for new Macbooks is a free iPod Touch.  Way cooler than the stupid Nano I got and promptly sold to my sister.  I retract my doubts about that statistic, but I think it’s still misleading.  It’s not like every fourth first-year is actually buying an iPhone.