Computers Beef Up K-School's Facilities

Kennedy School students are evaluating proposals for New York's West Side Highway and insurance policies for public employees in Holden, Mass thanks to $175,000 worth of computer equipment donated by the Sperry Corporation.

Fifty Sperry personal computers were installed at the K-School this summer to facilitate policy analysis and to familiarize Kennedy School students with computer use in public management, according to Mary M. O'Keeffe, chairman of the faculty computer committee.

More than 300 students now use a new computer room in the basement of the K-School's Littauer Center. Students use the room's 30 p.c.'s to run spreadsheet and statistics programs. James Stock, assistant professor of public policy and a member of the faculty computer committee, said yesterday.

Administrative Use

Administrators are using 15 of the $3,000 Model 30 p.c.'s, and five other computers are being repaired, Stock said.

The new computers vastly improve the existing mainframe system donated to the K-School by the Sperry Corporation two years ago. The most recent gift includes 10 dot-matrix and five letter quality printers.

Flexibility

"The Computers are a very flexible and accessible tool for students," O'Keeffe said.

The new machines provide several advantages to the K-School, according to Stock:

Othey increase the opportunities for more extensive case studies, modeling and analysis in the K-School curriculum.

Othey give students experience with computers, and

Othey are valuable research tools for Ph.D candidates.

With the p.c.'s, students in K-School courses are now doing a more thorough cost-benefit analysis of proposals for bus scheduling, the effects of cuts in the food stamps program, and other matters of public policy, O'Keeffe said.

Seven K-School courses have implemented computer use in their curriculum this year and "teachers keep coming up to us and saying we are going to use the computers," said Katie Elder, a lab technician.

Stock conservatively estimates that by the end of the year, all of the Master of Public Policy students and over three quarters of the Master of Public Administration candidates will have used the computers in their courses.

Despite the wide-scale use among students, the K-School is not going to implement a computer literacy exam comparable to the Quantitative Reasoning Requirement for undergraduates, O'Keeffe said.