The Wired Campus reports today that “Boston College Will Stop Offering New Students E-Mail Accounts.” All the incoming students may not have cloud-like email such as gmail, but that may be a major factor in this trend:

Many students don’t even want a college e-mail address these days because they already have well-established digital identities before they arrive on campus. That’s the conclusion that officials at Boston College came to in a recent review of their online services. So the college recently decided to stop offering full e-mail accounts to incoming students starting next fall.

Instead of a standard college e-mail account, next year’s freshmen will be offered an e-mail-forwarding service that will pass along messages to whatever personal e-mail account a student specifies . . .