Wow, I love that. American education did the same thing 50 years ago, but we made this change towards forcing students to write print. Nowadays they probably type a lot more than write, but there are still some brutally long written essays.

You can scoff but back in the old days before computers were that common academic papers were required to be printed not in cursive because it was hard to read cursive.

So academia has always used print.

Seriously go look at scans of research papers written in the 19th century, and tell me that you can understand a word of what they're saying.