I left college right as the "everyone always has a laptop" trend was beginning. I never could see the point of one in a class.

You can type much faster, yes, but you can't easily draw. Especially for math, engineering, science type class you really need to be able to quickly copy down diagrams, graphs, equations, etc that aren't always easily entered into a text editor. For me those always helped understanding much better than trying to describe the same concept in words.