Academic ties

CINCINNATI – For Ron Chicken and other freshmen at Montclair State University, the new freedoms that presumably came with college age included a mandatory cell phone with which the school could pinpoint their whereabouts on or off campus.

“I think some didn’t like the idea that they had to have it, and some thought it was a new way to track them,” said Chicken, 19, now preparing to enter his sophomore year at the New Jersey college.

But Chicken said that as time passed, students realized that the voluntary tracking system offered added safety and that the required phone had many useful functions.

“Most people have adjusted to it,” said Chicken, now a fan.

With nine out of 10 college students carrying cell phones – and many of them using traditional landline phones rarely or not at all – schools are seeking ways to maintain a line of communication while deploying technologies they believe students want and need.

Some colleges are abandoning the wires and phone jacks in their dormitories. Many of those systems, formerly a source of extra revenue for institutions, now operate at a loss.

As a replacement, some are introducing their own cellular services and handsets customized to connect students with campus services and information, while adding security and instructional tools.

The University of Cincinnati has begun a voluntary program offering all incoming freshmen a free mobile phone featuring the Bearcat mascot on the welcome screen, while Morrisville State College in New York has replaced landlines in its dorms with mandatory school-issued handsets.

Other colleges, however, are sticking with traditional phone service, worried that cellular may not be as reliable.

“Communicating with students on a regular basis has become a challenge, and schools are looking for ways to address that issue as well as safety,” said Patricia Scott, a spokeswoman for ACUTA, an association of communications technology professionals in academia.

While the phone technology known as Voice over Internet Protocol poses another viable option with the spread of broadband access on campuses, some experts see folly in trying to steer a wireless-minded generation of students toward anything but a cell phone.

Technology experts and educational groups say they haven’t quantified the number of schools replacing landlines with other technologies. ACUTA estimates that fewer than half the schools in North America have installed VoIP networks, but more are expected to do so in the future.

The University of Scranton in Pennsylvania plans to drop traditional landline service in its dorms this fall, but the school is not providing a wireless substitute.

“We considered issuing our own cell phone, but that would mean students could end up having two cell phones or having to discard their original one,” said Jerry DeSanto, Scranton’s chief information technology officer.

Initially, to help ensure a way to contact students who don’t always provide their cell numbers or even local addresses to the school, Scranton considered requiring students to enter such information at the school’s Web site before they could access certain services. The school has backed away from that requirement since it would be difficult to determine which students don’t actually have a cell phone.

The cell phone program at Montclair was spurred partly by the decline in revenue once reaped from providing long-distance service to students, as well as by requests from the university’s student life department.

Montclair surveyed students to determine what capabilities they’d want, then partnered with Rave Wireless Inc. to develop those software applications for cell phones.

Students can use the phones to get real-time alerts and information from the university, check class assignments, learn about specials at campus restaurants, or track the location of buses through Global Positioning System technology. GPS also enables the tracking feature that initially worried some students. Students can activate this “Guardian” service, launched earlier this year, if they ever feel threatened on campus.