The Importance of Electronic Key Cards on College Campuses

On an increasingly amount of college campuses, administrators and residential life officials are switching from old fashioned door keys to electronic key cards that open building doors and dorm room doors. The move on college campuses, has created a separate door building pass that you flash at a sensor to open the front door of a building. A separate card or your school ID card can then open your dorm room door.

The move to electronic key cards was deemed to be able to increase security on college campuses. Building access and security on a college campus are very important because campus security must be able to maintain a level of comfort and security for students. If students do not feel that their University is safe, then the school will develop and bad reputation and see a spiraling decrease in enrollment.

So why the switch to good old fashioned metal keys to electronic key cards? The way electronic key cards work, is that there is a bar code in each of them which activates the security access for the building's front door and for your dorm room suite door and inside door as well. Sometimes these different door access points are on several different access cards.

If you lose your electronic key card, then residential life on your college campus can simply deactivate that card key through their computer. If you lose your metal key, then your door will need to be re-keyed by a licensed professional which could take more than a week and could be a few hundred dollars to do. Switching off the bar code of an electronic key card and activating a new key card is relatively inexpensive and will usually cost students less than $50 to replace.

So how often do students lose their keys? A lot more often than you might imagine. Students often get drunk irresponsibly and often lose their keys somewhere. Many students in fact lose their school ID card by carelessly leaving on a desk table, lunch counter, library or other location.

School IDs have worked in a similar fashion to electronic card keys with regards to food. In almost every college throughout the country, the school ID card is used to swipe at a dining hall register to pay for food. If a student loses their school ID card, they go to a certain office to report the loss of their card and they get a new one. The bar code of their lost Student ID card is deactivated so that someone else can't access that person's food account which usually has several hundred dollars worth of food on it. The food account is then transferred to the new school ID.