Sarah Ledwith, product marketing manager, CBORD

The words “student success” are all around us nowadays. As the increasing price of higher education makes headlines, colleges and universities face tougher questions about how students’ investments lead to success academically, socially and economically.

These are important questions, and the answers often focus on academic programs. How, then, do college services traditionally not viewed as academic, a campus card office for example, make the case for investment and high-level attention? The simple answer is that we must focus on how campus card services impact student success. We can do this in several ways:

Safety

Here we take a cue from Maslow’s Hierarchy and acknowledge that basic safety needs must be met before students’ emotional and intellectual growth can occur. What, then, could be a better investment than security?

Electronic access control, intelligent video surveillance, efficient alarms management, and other security technologies are critical investments to protect students – not to mention easing the minds of parents and administrators. When students know that their safety is a top priority on campus, then they can focus on the intellectual and emotional growth experiences they came to your university for. Safety first.

Engagement

When students use their campus cards for class attendance, checking into events, voting in campus elections, etc., it’s easy to correlate different types of engagement with outcomes. For example, do students that attend at least 80% of classes and are members of at least one organization have a higher likelihood of graduating within four years? This could help make the case for more student clubs. Do students attending fewer than 50% of classes have a significantly higher drop-out rate? This could prompt an academic advisor to reach out.

The data you track and how you measure it is up to you. The campus card program puts a powerful tool in your hands to help you do it.

24/7 service

College students don’t live according to standard business hours. When they can access your services any time from their devices of choice – typically their phones – they can better operate on the schedules that work for them.

For example, offering online ordering for food delivery can help you fuel those late night study sessions without adding too much to your overhead. And giving students the ability to open their residence hall room doors with their phones helps prevent late-night lockout calls to RAs. With online and mobile convenience, excellent student services are available any time.

Keep Your Focus on Students

Last but certainly not least, hosted campus card solutions are gaining popularity because they help you keep your focus on students. When a solution is hosted in the cloud, you need not devote time and personnel to server maintenance, software upgrades and other IT-heavy administrative tasks. Instead, your team can spend more time focusing on students.

And isn’t that really the whole point?

About the AVISIAN Publishing Expert Panel

At the close of each year, AVISIAN Publishing’s editorial team selects a group of key leaders from various sectors of the market to serve as Expert Panelists. Individuals are asked to share their unique insight into different aspects of the campus card market. During the months of December and January, these panelist’s predictions are published at CR80News.