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This is hopelessly idealistic. It might make sense for some particular general purpose applications, e.g. Office -> LibreOffice, but at the college level there

This is hopelessly idealistic. It might make sense for some particular general purpose applications, e.g. Office -> LibreOffice, but at the college level there are simply not suitable free alternatives for many proprietary software packages. Additionally, many potential employers specifically want graduates with experience with those proprietary packages, so not providing them with that experience handicaps them relative to graduates from other schools that do provide that experience.

michaelmrose 6y ago
Public Education is where you learn stuff like science, math, writing, literature. It is not where you learn how to use the current version of Microsoft office that will be obsolete in 5 years. Anyone who is computer literate can likely be trained to use a particular software package by their employer. This is especially true when their particular company is liable to use a fair bit of very specific applications/web applications to manage the company's particular business. It is impossible and pointless to worry about whether high school graduates know particular software packages when there are many and varied different choices for any industry and so many industries to pick from. Higher ed should still be about the subject matter not once again particular soon to be obsolete versions of whatever software is common in their industry. When you spend 4-10 years learning a topic being 6 hours behind another applicant doesn't seem much like a handicap.