When Hope College in Holland, Mich. had to close campus in the middle of the day last fall due to a virus outbreak, it alerted everyone with a text message. While it’s the only time so far that the new alert system was used, it’s a good illustration of how many universities and colleges are looking for ways to make their campuses safer.

“The instructions in those text messages can be very brief, almost Twitter-length,” said a Hope College spokesperson. “You can either give instructions or just tell them to go to the college’s Web site, where we can immediately update the status of what’s going on.”

At another Michigan university, students can sign up for a text-message alert system that will inform them about everything from crime to inclement weather.

Read more here.

Depauw University in Greencastle, Ind. is now enabling its students to use their campus card at nine restaurants off campus. The program will be managed by Off-Campus Advantage, a subsidiary of campus card provider CBORD.

The restaurants will give 9.5% of each transaction to DePauw and also pay a software fee that will allow their credit card machines to accept the school’s campus card. Part of DePauw’s percentage will be paid directly to Off-Campus Advantage, that will monitor all transactions and make sure the money ends up in the right hands.

Read more here.  

Two more universities have signed up with TipNow, the San Jose, Calif.-based text messaging service designed to increase campus safety by allowing students to anonymously notify campus security personnel regarding non-emergency suspicious activity.

California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo and Quinnipiac University, Hamden, Conn., are now offering the new service from Resiligence, Inc., which is looking to deploy the system with other universities, city police departments and corporate campuses.

TipNow is a tip collection and management system for anonymous tips originating from electronic mail and cell phone/personal digital assistant SMS or text messages. TipNow encrypts the reporter’s cell phone number or email ID, guaranteeing anonymity.

It is offered in the software as a service model which means it does not require any hardware installation or servicing by the user. TipNow also allows campus safety personnel to anonymously interact with the reporter.

Students returning this fall to Elizabeth City State University in North Carolina will find waiting for them a revamped student ID card with more services. While previous versions of the card granted users access to campus buildings and the stadium, the new VikingOne card will also have debit capabilities for use on-campus only at vending machines, the campus restaurant and the campus book store.

“Students have to have a separate card for everything, so this will be a major advantage for us,” said a university spokesperson. More services are likely to be added to the card by next spring, the official noted.

Read more here.  

The University of Memphis, one of two Tennessee schools without a mandatory on-campus dining program, plans to change that starting with the fall semester when all full-time freshmen and sophomores will automatically have $300 charged to their student accounts. Dubbed “Dining Dollar$,” the money will be placed on their student ID cards.

While initially designed to increase food sales, it’s also meant to get students to eat on campus with friends, classmates and professors, which administrators believe will enhance their interactions with peers, said a college administrator.

Read more here.  

The 2008 National Campus Safety and Security Project survey found that most colleges have campus-wide emergency plans that meet minimum standards but warned that just 30% of campuses have a “business continuity plan” detailing what they should do if a calamity seriously disrupts campus operations.

The survey also pointed out that those schools least likely to field their own police departments (such as independents and two-year colleges) were also less likely to have “mutual aid agreements” with local law enforcement or other agencies to share resources in the case of an emergency.

However, survey sponsors cautioned that due to a low response rate to the survey–just 16%–the results should be considered “more exploratory” than definitive.

Read morehere.  

While the new credit card law doesn’t take effect until February, many card issuers are already gearing up to comply with the new regulations. That means there will be fewer freebies to convince students to sign up for a new credit card. More importantly, those students under 21 will find they’re no longer eligible for a card.

The only way underage students will be able to obtain a credit card is if they can prove they have the capability of repaying the debit or if a parent or other person over 21 co-signs for them. Kiplinger reports that the average credit card debt for college students is $3,173.

In addition, Illinois has joined other states that have adopted laws restricting on-campus credit card marketing. This law, which takes effect Jan. 1, prevents companies from offering freebies to students in exchange for signing up for a credit card. If colleges decide to allow companies to market on campus, the schools will be required to offer some form of consumer finance education to freshmen. It also bars private and public colleges in Illinois from selling student names and contact information to credit card companies.

Read more from Kiplinger here or about the Illinois law here.

With students pouring back into colleges and universities this fall, a good service schools could offer students is a tip sheet on how to avoid becoming an ID theft victim. Besides standard tips, such as shredding credit card statements, reconciling bank or credit card statements and protecting their Social Security numbers, there are other ways students can protect themselves.

For example, most are voracious users of social networking sites like Facebook. Share too much information on these sites, and it could be an easy matter for thieves to garner enough information to make a student’s life miserable.

According to the US Department of Education’s Web site, students are more vulnerable to identity theft ‘because of the availability of personal data and the way many students handle this data.”

IdentityTruth, a Waltham, Mass. provider of services to help consumers safeguard their identity, recently released a list of tips that schools could provide students when they show up for class.

Here are some tips from IdentityTruth to aid in ID theft prevention:

• Savvy social networking: With millions of people using social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, there are countless opportunities for identity thieves. Students should set restrictions on their profiles so that only friends can view their information, and should delete history/cookies if accessing those sites through public computers.

• Beware phishing text Messages: Neither your bank nor your credit card company will ever send you a text requesting login or account information, so if you get a message asking you to verify your login, delete it. To be safe, call your cell phone provider and opt-out of this marketing feature.

• Smarter cell phone: Never store identifying names, companies, or login information on your cell phone. If you loose your cell phone, all this information can be easily extracted off your SIM Card and used to access your personal information. If you lose your cell phone, contact your provider immediately to report the loss.

• Protect your laptop: In recent years, one out of four data breaches affecting colleges and universities stemmed from the theft of laptops at the registrar’s office. To make your laptop safer, first. always make sure that your laptop is password protected. Second, purchase a computer security cable, which prevents your laptop from being removed from a stationary object. Last, ask your campus police department if they have a laptop engraving program. Identity thieves may be less likely to steal laptops that are personally engraved.

Students at the University of Minnesota football games who show signs of inebriation, such as excessive rowdiness, could be asked to take a breath test. If they fail, they won’t be allowed back in the stadium. In addition, their student ID card or season ticket could be flagged, which means they’ll have to take a breath test the next time they show up for a game. The stadium is dry but there are tailgate parties as well as bars located nearby.

The school’s program, called “Check BAC” (blood alcohol content), is similar to one the University of Wisconsin at Madison implemented. This past football season Wisconsin had 81 underage students and 54 students of legal drinking age ejected for drunken behavior and required to take a breath test at subsequent games, said a university spokesperson. None failed future breath tests, the spokesman added.

Read more here.  

Blackboard Inc., a provider of education technology, has released version 3.5 of Blackboard Transact that strengthens data and application security for campus commerce and card programs and enables institutions to process credit card transactions while meeting new industry standards.

Blackboard Transact is used by colleges and universities to support campus commerce and security management. The company’s newest release complies with the Payment Application Data Security Standard both in application architecture and written operating procedures. Release 3.5 received validation from Trustwave, a top security assessor company, and acceptance from the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council.

With 3.5, institutions can host the application and process credit card transactions that complies with the PCI Data Security Standard well ahead of the July 2010 deadline for institutions to only use Payment Application-compliant applications in their payment environments.

The new release also introduces new capabilities to support enterprise-wide compliance policies and risk management and adds a range of new capabilities including improved database audit logging, user account and password features including forced complex passwords, limited repeat access attempts, account deactivation after 90 days of no use and completely re-written user documentation.

“Payment application security compliance is a very important initiative for our university,” said Stacie Gomm, associate vice president for Information Technology at Utah State University. “Our controller’s office is driving this initiative to ensure that all of our financial systems and processes are PCI compliant. The enhanced security features of the Blackboard Transact platform are an important step towards compliance for our campus-wide ID card solution.”