A growing number of colleges across the country are recognizing student hunger, and the need for additional resources for low-income students that need a meal. The latest institution to join this trend is Rider University, where a program has been started that enables students to donate guest swipes from their meal plan to fellow students in need.

As reported by student publication, Rider News, the new meal swipe donation initiative began earlier this month, enabling the option for guest swipes from student meal plans to be donated. The swipes will be anonymously assigned to students who have leveraged Rider University's food pantry. The program has already been approved for next fall.

“Here we are at a private school — it’s a wake-up call to all of us to realize just how many of our own students are in need,” said Jan Friedman-Krupnick, the university’s assistant vice president of student affairs, in a Rider News interview. “I know of students that I’ve worked with who have not had food to eat. It’s really great to enhance what the food pantry is doing by providing meals for people.”

Rider joins a growing roster of campuses to donate unused student meal swipes, with the likes of UConn and the University of Minnesota seeing success in recent months.

Friedman-Krupnick approached Rider’s dining services provider, Aramark, about whether a swipe donation program was doable. It was determined that students could donate guest passes to students who did not have a meal plan and needed to use the university's food pantry.

“In the pantry, we don’t have hot foods; we just have non-perishables,” Friedman-Krupnick said. “Aramark agreed to partner with us, and within five minutes after the form went out, we had ten people who donated.”

According to the Rider News report, Rider's financial aid office estimates that some 30% of students fall within the low-income guidelines, suggesting that a number of Rider students have limited financial resources and could be in need of food insecurity services.

Automated school safety and operations provider, ScholarChip, has made a version of its Enterprise-class Visitor Management system available to eligible schools free of charge. The move is designed to provide K-12 schools, regardless of their budget, with at least a basic level of campus safety.

Dubbed Forever Free, the free version of ScholarChip's visitor management system includes two vital components: the ability to register and check in visitors, and the capacity to check visitors against a comprehensive database of sex offenders.

“All of us with deep concern about school safety, as well as providers of safety technology and solutions, have to ask ourselves a simple question: How can I help? Offering ScholarChip’s Forever Free Visitor Management is a step in the right direction,” says Maged Atiya, ScholarChip CEO/CTO.

Establishing an efficient and auditable access control process for visitors is a key element to any security plan. This, along with knowing the identity of every campus visitor, creates a culture of accountability and vigilance from which the K-12 environment can benefit.

The Forever Free Visitor Management System will enable users to enter data from a visitor’s driver’s license and automatically check ScholarChip’s extensive sex-offender database. School administrators will also know, in real-time, who is visiting their campus.

There are over 700,000 registered sex offenders in the United States, with each state, many Indian territories, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands each maintaining separate registries. The Department of Justice, too, maintains its own separate database for federal offenders.

ScholarChip integrates, verifies, and updates all databases downloaded from each available registry on a daily basis. This data is collected through the Department of Justice’s National Sex Offender Registry database, individual state offender databases, and third-party service companies.

“The national dialogue on school safety is a vital and continuing one, and we know that school budgets are tight,” says Atiya. “I’m glad that we are able to offer free visitor management to those schools that need it.”

The University of New Mexico has revealed a new design for its student ID card, the LoboCard. The card redesign will replace the existing aesthetic, which has been in place for the past eight years.

According to an official university release, the decision to revamp the LoboCard is purely a cosmetic one, and will not include any system or functional updates. The previous card design was implemented in 2010, when all LoboCards had to be replaced for a card system upgrade.

Part of the inspiration for the redesign was the launch of the university's new logo last fall. That new branding marked a materials design refresh for a number of UNM departments, including the LoboCard Office.

The new card design was the top pick as chosen by a random sample survey of UNM students and employees. The new design features a contemporary styling that includes the new University of New Mexico logo along with the university's iconic Lobo shield.

The LoboCard Office spearheaded the launch of the redesigned student, staff and faculty ID card. The new design is currently being issued to all incoming staff and students, as well as any members of the campus community that need to replace their ID card.

Student ID cards already in circulation will remain valid, with the new card design being an optional replacement. Current LoboCard replacement fees will apply to those students wishing to update their cards with the new design.

Kent State University is in the process of updating and replacing more door locks in campus residence halls to enable student ID cards to unlock dorm rooms.

According to Kent State University Housing, the access control upgrades are ongoing and will enable students and staff to use their FLASHcards for access to individual rooms. The FLASHcard can already be used for room access in four on-campus residence halls, with plans to expand card access to the university's remaining residences over the coming year.

The new card access system will support both magstripe and contactless entry to accommodate the cards already in circulation, and in the event a FLASHcard does not function properly, students can check out a temporary key from their residence hall's front desk.

Kent State Residence Services is spearheading the phased project that will include all campus residence halls, as well as facilitate a consolidation of student credentials. Students living in buildings that have already been moved to the new system no longer have to use two different credentials for their meal plan and room access.

This latest batch of lock upgrades brings the campus-wide project closer to completion, with three additional residence halls slated for door lock upgrades by Fall 2018 and the remaining three residences to be fully upgraded by the start of Fall 2019.

The move to contactless cards is one of the most important decisions facing campus card offices today. In this video spotlight, learn how Purdue University improved its student experience by issuing contactless student ID cards that underpin all aspects of life on campus.

The PUID provides access to the campus rec center, academic buildings, libraries, transportation, dining halls, residence halls, laundry, and BoilerExpress debit account. Through a partnership with card system vendor, Blackboard Transact, Purdue has forged a campus card program that's now more scalable and better prepared for other advanced identification technologies down the line.

For most students, spring break marks a week's vacation away from campus. But not everyone elects to leave their institution. The University of Connecticut is accommodating -- and feeding -- those students that decide to stay on campus for spring break by opening the doors of a campus dining hall.

As reported by The Daily Campus, students must first sign up online for the meals they anticipate needing during the course of the week. The meal plan is limited to one breakfast, lunch and dinner per day starting Saturday, March 10, through Saturday, March 17, with meals being served from the university's Northwest Dining Hall.

According to UConn dining services, only meal plan swipes are accepted as part of the initiative, as both Flex passes and points are inactive during spring break. The spring break dining accommodations are an annual offering, with about 250 students signing up every year.

“So much of it is tied to there being simply some students who can’t get home or don’t have a vacation planned,” said Mike White, Director of Residential Dining, in a Daily Campus interview.

The university is opening just the one dining hall for spring break diners both because it adequately serves the number of students, as well as accommodates other scheduled conference events that will be utilizing campus dining facilities during spring break. The hours of operation during spring break include three dining windows: breakfast 7:00am - 9:30am; lunch 11:30am - 2:15pm; dinner 4:15pm - 7:15pm.

“Prior to every break, I evaluate our operational needs based on conferences, students still on campus and then the size of the dining hall,” White said. “The one thing we are trying to always do is be aware of our expenses, the size of the building versus what we really need.”

In addition to the spring break program, UConn Dining Services maintains a similar initiative during the Thanksgiving break period in November.

New Hampshire's Plymouth State University has taken a proactive step toward opening a new revenue stream on campus. The university's newest residence hall -- a 96,000 square foot, seven-story facility -- will convert to a 188-room hotel during the summer months.

As reported by Building Design and Construction, the new Merrill Place residence hall opened last August, and has all the necessary components to act as a full-service hotel. In addition to standard lodging, the building has been constructed with built-in reception and concierge stations, as well as includes a conference center that has thus far been booked solid.

University officials maintain that Merrill Place’s primary purpose is to provide campus housing for students, which comes in response to a boost in admissions over the past few years. Plymouth State currently has 4,200 undergraduate and 2,100 graduate students, and with the opening of Merrill Place, the university can now offer campus housing to 60% of its undergrads.

“Aligning program and aesthetics with a revenue-generating model is increasingly critical to today’s budget-conscious colleges and universities,” said Yanel de Angel, an Associate Principal for the project's architect, Perkins + Will. “The students here have embraced this whole idea about a residence hall with a hospitality layer. And we came away thinking that we might be able to take a little bit of risk with our designs in the future.”

By doubling as a hotel and conference center, the $33 million project will also provide a valuable service to the surrounding Plymouth, N.H. community. Plymouth previously boasted just one event facility with a total capacity of 330 people, and only a handful of hotels. The new conference center at Merrill Place can accommodate 276 seated attendees and 827 standing attendees.

On the student residence side of the coin, there are two room sizes available to student residents: 10 x 18 feet and 11.6 by 18 feet. Some of the smaller student rooms are currently single occupancy, while double-occupancy rooms will see the two twin beds pushed together and rented as a single king bed rooms for hotel purposes.

Following recent administrative personnel changes, Plymouth State has been slower to market Merrill Place as a summer-season hotel than initially expected, though the university has begun compiling advertising campaign materials. There are plans to offer hotel room and the conference center rentals both as a package and individually.

It's a well known fact that modern campus card systems are repositories for a wealth of valuable and actionable data. Between physical access logs, payments, event ticketing, attendance and many other vital data points, it becomes possible to paint an increasingly vivid picture of student life on campus.

Now, the University of Arizona is making significant strides in the realm of campus card data interpretation thanks to the work of university researcher, Sudha Ram. Ram's Smart Campus research is tracking students' social interactions and daily routines via CatCard usage -- Arizona's student ID -- and leveraging that information to predict freshman retention.

When students use their ID cards they leave a digital trace that indicates exact times and locations. According to an official university release, Ram's research is tracking these digital traces to identify possible student trends and relationships, and more importantly, how those relationships affect students' likelihood of returning to campus after their freshman year.

"By getting their digital traces, you can explore their patterns of movement, behavior and interactions, and that tells you a great deal about them," Ram says.

CatCards are used for access to residence halls, rec centers, science labs, libraries, academic support centers, and more. And, as with many student ID cards, CatCards are also used to make payments. Students can opt to load cash onto the card for use at vending machines and to pay for food and other services on campus. All these interaction points combine to create a highly detailed web of data points from which usage trends can be constructed.

Working with Arizona's IT department, Ram gathered data on freshman CatCard usage spanning a three-year period. She then used that data to create large networks that mapped which students interacted with one another and how often.

The idea behind establishing these social trends is that students that are less socially connected are often more likely to drop out. The same CatCard data can also be used to look at the regularity of student routines and whether those patterns occur during the week or on weekends.

Ram's data seemingly backs this idea as an analysis of student social interactions and routines was able to predict 85-90% of the freshmen who would not return for a second year at Arizona. Those students having less-established routines and fewer social interactions were, in fact, most at-risk for dropping out.

"Of all the students who drop out at the end of the first year, with our social integration measures, we're able to do a prediction at the end of the first 12 weeks of the semester with 85-90% recall," Ram said. "That means out of the 2,000 students who drop out, we're able to identify 1,800 of them."

Thanks in part to Ram's research Arizona now generates lists — twice per semester and twice in the summer — of the top 20% of students most at-risk in each college. The lists are then shared with the individual colleges, with the idea that advisers will reach out to students who need additional support or guidance.

The university is also preparing to launch an online dashboard where advisers can access pertinent data and assess student risk in real time throughout the semester.

Student retention is an ever-present concern for colleges and universities nationwide, but the tools are already available to make meaningful change. The data accrued by contemporary campus card systems can be used to refine campus services and business operations, and as proven by Ram and the University of Arizona, identify potentially at-risk students through attendance, access control and transaction trends.

For more on Sudha Ram's research, and how the university of Arizona is harnessing its campus card data to support student success, checkout the university's full write up.

China's Zhejiang University is giving students a new way to access meals at the campus canteen that's moving away from the previous method of swiping in with student ID cards.

According to a Shine report, Zhejiang University the new, high-tech means of meal payment and tracking pairs diners with food trays and logs consumption at the table. Zhejiang students still follow the tried and true method of swiping their campus cards to pay for food in university canteens, but coinciding with a newly-opened campus dining hall the university wanted to test a cardless dining experience.

Students and teachers can now register online with their personal information, mobile phone number, and a campus card used for payment. But instead of presenting the campus card at the dining facility, the new program uses a facial recognition scanner to pair each diner with a chip-embedded food tray. Students can proceed with loading food items onto the tray from the buffet-style dining hall.

Each dish has a sensor that logs the price of the item, while the tables that the trays are placed on work as a scales. As students walk through the buffet area, the price of their meal is calculated and money is automatically deducted from their corresponding campus card account.

In addition to billing, once the meal is taken, the system provides a report with the total calories and proportion of protein, carbohydrates and fat that the student chose for that meal. The reports are sent directly to the student's mobile device, with the idea being to encourage students to pursue a more balanced diet.

In addition to encouraging healthier eating, university officials believe the high-tech dining facility could improve overall efficiency. Still in a trial phase, the cutting-edge dining service is currently only available at the lunchtime window each day for students and employees at the university.

Florida International University is offering its students a new way to pay for library late fees and fines, while simultaneously helping the campus community and those in need.

According to a university release, FIU Libraries is working with the FIU Student Food Pantry to enable students to pay down fines by providing food donations to the pantry. The Food for Fines program will be active from March 19-30, enabling students with library fines to bring in a donation for the Food Pantry in lieu of paying cash, with each food item counting as payment for one fine.

The program excludes inter-library loan fines and rental fees, as well as any replacement fees. However, the program does support one-time fee waivers for library-owned electronic devices up to a maximum $50 fine.

“Food for Fines demonstrates the library’s commitment to the FIU community by helping financially challenged students," says Genevieve Diamond, head of Access Services at FIU Libraries. "Students can pay off overdue fees while helping their fellow students by donating non-perishable food items to the campus pantry, where it is then distributed to those in need.”

FIU maintains two food pantry locations, one at each of its Biscayne Bay and Modesto A. Maidique Campuses. FIU opened the first food pantry location in 2013, with the second opening a year later. The pantries were opened following the university recognizing an increase in the number of students who lacked consistent access to food -- a common occurrence at colleges and universities across the country.

No proof of need is required at the university's food pantries and students can access the service once per week for up to 10 pounds of food each visit. The Food Pantry is available to all currently enrolled students, whether they have ongoing need or short term needs stemming from financial emergencies, and students must present a valid student ID card.

Food pantry items being offered as part of the fee payment program must be labeled, non-perishable, and cannot be past the indicated freshness or expiration date.