Administrative Experience
Question 2.4 Details

What campus and community services are covered by debit–card, smart–card, or one–card systems?

On a growing number of campuses, many student services-on and off campus-can be invoked by using campus debit–, smart–, or one–card systems. The card you receive is often called your student ID card and should be protected as carefully as your driver's license or passport. Smart cards store information to authenticate their users and to authorize them to use a large variety of services. Such cards can serve as debit and credit cards for students as well as to regulate students' library privileges, parking, residence and dining hall access, meal plan, lab access, student health care access, recreation center access, and in many cases can entitle their users to discounts on goods and services sold in stores around the campus.

Smart cards or similar services can be a source of convenience to students and their parents. First, they can eliminate the need for myriad other forms of identification and authorization such as parking permits, library cards, credit cards, and so forth. Second, they make it possible to unify the accounting and billing for student activities and to provide a record of the services a student consumes. These tools also support campus efforts to provide for the physical security of students by electronically capturing and recording building entries and exits.

Students and their parents should ask a variety of questions regarding campus electronic service access approaches. Such questions might include:

• What personal information is printed or embedded on the smart card?
• What kinds of services are accessible and how?
• Does the college or university charge a fee for its smart cards?
• Are smart cards used for secured access to institutional facilities or services?