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.

The latest update to the legislation in North Carolina that would make college and university student ID cards a valid form of voter identification in the state is a postponement of the deadline decision date. This week, the state House and Senate approved and signed a bill that delays implementation of the photo identification requirement for voting until the 2020 election cycle.

A law approved in North Carolina that would make student ID cards an official form of voter identification has been met with initial reticence by universities across the state. Now, Caldwell Community College and Technical Institute in Hudson, NC has announced its intention to not sign an attestation form that would allow its student ID cards to be eligible as voter identification.

The University of Arkansas’ University Recreation department has reported a positive correlation between freshmen usage of rec facilities and student retention and academic success. The university used card access transactions at rec facilities and identified positive relationships among freshman who utilized campus rec and those who achieved higher GPAs and retention rates.

Under a North Carolina bill approved last year, the university student ID card has been added to the list of acceptable forms of voter identification. But colleges and universities in the state are postponing signing an attestation document that would make their campus cards official voter IDs, as university officials try to interpret the law and its ramifications.