Pennsylvania’s Bloomsburg University has long been using its leftover dining funds to stock the shelves of the local food pantry, and donates more than a ton of food and thousands of dollars in meal-plan funds each year. And a more unique use of the donations, is in the Bloomsburg Food Cup­board’s bagging of breakfast, lunch and snacks for elementary students from under privileged families to take home each weekend.

A law passed in North Carolina this week could carve an easier path for student IDs to be used for voter identification in the state. The new iteration of a law initially passed late in 2018 removes some of the problematic language of the initial law, and is the latest development in a back and forth debate between lawmakers and university administrators in the state.

Food insecurity is a growing issue for students across the country, leading to meal-donation programs popping up on campuses across the country. But the University of California, Merced’s iCare meal donation program has set the bar particularly high both in terms of the service it provides and how the system has been implemented.

The University of Connecticut Athletic Department has announced new ticketing changes that will enable students load game day tickets to their student ID cards. The change will enable student entry on a first-come, first-served basis and will apply to football, men’s and women’s soccer, men’s and women’s basketball and men’s hockey.

It’s not rare for a university to leverage a mobile application to help streamline campus parking. What is rare, however, is for a university to create it’s own app in house, and that’s exactly what the University of Massachusetts Lowell has done with its new Parking Spaces app. The app displays real-time parking availability at all three of the university’s parking garages, as well as the two largest lots on campus.

There’s a growing body of research indicating that classroom attendance is inherently linked to student academic performance and success. Old Dominion University is the latest to implement an attendance solution, and has done so by constructing its own hardware solution in house.

Transit functionality on the campus card has long been tricky business. When we examined this conundrum in our 2015 coverage “Getting a lift with the student ID,” we spoke with professionals across the industry in an attempt to decipher exactly why this campus card use case is so elusive. What we discovered was that technical, financial, logistical and political issues can all serve to confound what is ultimately a well-intentioned idea.

Seton Hall University recently completed renovations on a new, round-the-clock study space. The After Hours Study Space has been made possible in large part by the campus card and a door access reader. The After Hours Study Space is a joint initiative funded between the Libraries and the Office of the Provost in response to students’ long-expressed need for a safe study and work space that’s available during overnight hours.

A student ID card policy implemented at Loyola University New Orleans has been the cause of some frustration. The policy, which took effect back in January, fines students who fail to present a Loyola ID when entering a campus residence hall. The idea behind the policy is to both better lock down access to campus residences, as well as help to hold the campus community accountable in keeping student IDs in possession at all times.

Maryland’s Washington College has now made the student ID card a necessary component of its Safe Ride service in an effort to improve the service through examining frequency of ridership. The card readers will be used, in part, to record the number of students who leverage the service and better determine Safe Ride’s busy times so that the program can hone its services and improve accessibility.