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By Greg Bartlett

Colleges are businesses like any other, even if their clients are students and their service is higher education. And just like any other organization operating in this current economic climate, universities are desperate to find savings and increase productivity in every area. Campus services are expanding rapidly, and management can find it difficult keep track of it all. Thankfully, today’s GPS tracker technology offers a few solutions for students, teachers, and administrators alike.

College Students & GPS

In the interest of safety, some colleges have opted to provide individual or cell phone-based GPS trackers to their students. Montclair State in New Jersey has given some students GPS “timers” which can be activated in the case of emergency. If a student is stranded or needs help, he or she can notify campus security of his or her position. Given recent campus shootings, a well-integrated GPS and threat management system can help safety officials deal with the worst kinds of crises. Thankfully the technology hasn’t yet attracted wolf-criers, as security only receives an average of one notification per month.

Many schools issue school laptops to students needed aid, but unfortunately theft in the dorms can be a serious issue. A great way to mitigate the problem is to integrate a small GPS tracker into the university laptop. When students report a stolen computer, administrators can simply look up its current position. If the position is off-campus or even out of state, it can be reported to law enforcement, which can recover the laptop in due time. The same goes for teachers’ laptops, which are perhaps more prone to theft than others.

A variety of other activities can benefit from GPS trackers, as well. Many universities offer extensive shuttle services to their students, and like other public transportation systems, they can sometimes suffer from route inefficiency, which can quickly be cleared up after an analysis is made with GPS technology. Perhaps more useful in the long term is a reporting service that lets students track where campus shuttles are at any given moment and plan accordingly. One such network between the colleges of Notre Dame and Loyola offers students access to a website which shows the position of shuttles overlaid on a map.

As GPS tracking technology continues to impact every kind of business and organization, it’s nice to see effective GPS integration producing greater cost savings and efficiency to our nation’s schools.