Poll: Most College Students Prefer Laptops Over Tablets for School

mobile devices

Even though tablet purchases are on the rise among college students, most of them still prefer to use laptops for learning. At the same time, overwhelming majorities of students believe tablets will serve more and more educational functions in the future.

According to a new Harris Poll conducted for Pearson, 52 percent of college students now own tablets. That is up from 45 percent in 2014. However, only one in 12 (8 percent) college students aged 18 and 19 (typically freshmen and sophomores) said they use a tablet every day for their school work, while two-thirds (66 percent) use a laptop every day for school.

More older college students (those 25 and older) use tablets every day for school — 27 percent of respondents. Still, even more of the students that age use laptops instead (about 40 percent).

Even if their current use of tablets for school is low, 83 percent of all college students said they believe tablets will transform the way students learn in the future, and 70 percent said tablets will replace printed textbooks within the next five years.

"College students continue to show enthusiasm for learning digitally," said Seth Reichlin, Pearson senior vice president of market research for higher education.

More than half of college students 25 and older consider themselves early adopters (51 percent), but only 36 percent of all college students would say the same thing about themselves.

While Internet connectivity continues to expand all the time, 8 percent of black college students said they do not have WiFi access at home, compared to 2 percent of white students.

Tablet ownership has continued to grow over the five years since the devices' introduction to the market, but laptop and smartphone ownership have, for the most part, stabilized with little year-to-year change. Today, 88 percent of college students said they own a laptop and 85 percent said they own a smartphone.

The poll was conducted over a month this past spring. Just over 1,200 college students from around the United States were surveyed. The full report is available at the Pearson site.

About the Author

Michael Hart is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer and the former executive editor of THE Journal.

Featured

  • laptop with a neural network image, surrounded by books, notebooks, a magnifying glass, a pencil cup, and a desk lamp

    D2L Lumi AI Updates Add Personalized Study Supports

    Learning platform D2L has announced new artificial intelligence features for D2L Lumi that help provide more personalized study supports for students.

  • illustration of an open textbook, computer monitor with flowchart, gears, a wrench, and AI cloud symbol

    Wiley Introduces New AI Courseware Tools

    Wiley has created four new tools for its zyBooks courseware platform designed to improve instruction, learning outcomes, and academic integrity in college STEM courses.

  • hooded figure types on a laptop, with abstract manifesto-like posters taped to the wall behind them

    Hacktivism Is a Growing Threat to Higher Education

    In recent years, colleges and universities have faced an evolving array of cybersecurity challenges. But one threat is showing signs of becoming both more frequent and more politically charged: hacktivism.

  • server racks, a human head with a microchip, data pipes, cloud storage, and analytical symbols

    OpenAI, Oracle Expand AI Infrastructure Partnership

    OpenAI and Oracle have announced they will develop an additional 4.5 gigawatts of data center capacity, expanding their artificial intelligence infrastructure partnership as part of the Stargate Project, a joint venture among OpenAI, Oracle, and Japan's SoftBank Group that aims to deploy 10 gigawatts of computing capacity over four years.