Marshall University students will soon be able to enter campus dining halls with their fingerprint, adding an alternative to the student ID card. Two campus dining facilities will be included in the biometric access system for now and students are currently engaging in the fingerprint enrollment process.

Michigan State was recently tasked with updating antiquated access systems at a sensitive computer engineering lab, and decided to go in a new direction by implementing a multi-modal biometric access control solution from ZKAccess.

At participating elementary schools across Singapore, students will soon be able to make purchases with the touch of a finger thanks to a new biometric program from POSB Bank. The addition of biometrics will be a new feature added to the existing Smart Buddy program that enables students in the region to make purchases via smart wrist watches at participating POS terminals.

Biometric technology company, Zwipe, has partnered with London’s Rose Bruford College to overhaul the campus’ physical security needs by introducing a combination of biometric and contactless access control. The solution is a fingerprint activated contactless credential that works with both 125kHz and 13.56MHz infrastructures already in place on a campus.

Excelsior Springs High School just outside of Kansas City is now using fingerprint readers to help support a new education format that lets students plot their own daily schedules.

Biometrics is now being used to facilitate a range of physical and logical access, secure ID verification for payments and other utilities, and it’s the technology that millions of people now use to unlock their phone each day. But on campus, biometric technology wasn’t always so pervasive, so we’re taking a look back to 2004 and our “Bolt-on biometrics for the college campus” story that discussed ways campuses could get started with the technology.

The University of Nottingham is set to launch a biometric pilot using fingerprint technology to facilitate student registration and attendance at mandatory lectures and exams.

California’s Vista Unified School District has expanded the use of a biometrics system that sees students scan their fingerprints to purchase food at the cafeteria lunch line. The biometrics program has reportedly led to expedited lines and introduced new layers of security for students’ accounts from theft or accidental misuse.

Whether it’s misinformation, concerns over personal data or a general reticence over the implementation of new technology, biometric solutions on campus are still not pervasive. Still, successful university deployments of biometrics for access control, privilege control and authentication have already demonstrated the power of the technology. With this in mind we spoke to ColorID’s biometric specialist, Tim Ortscheid, about campus deployments and discussed security vs. convenience.

Iowa’s Wartburg College spent the month of November trialling biometric access at its dining facility, with a view to test the systems efficiency and potentially implement the system in the near future.