February 28, 2008
As campus shootings make headlines, students still slow to embrace cell phone alert systems
The massacre at Virginia Tech last year sent colleges nationwide scrambling to improve how they get alerts to students during crises on campus. One solution: Text messages sent to cell phones.
But while hundreds of campuses have adopted text alerts, most students are not embracing the system - even in an age when they consider their mobile phones indispensable, reports the Associated Press.
"Omnilert, a Northern Virginia company that provides an emergency alert system called e2Campus to more than 500 campuses, reports an average enrollment rate among students, faculty and staff of just 39 percent.
Across the country, colleges 'are really struggling with how to get the enrollment numbers up,'' said Steven Healey, Princeton University's public safety director and an expert on campus security.
The University of Missouri's Columbia campus tried a giveaway - students who signed up for the alerts were entered in a drawing for an iPod Nano - in hopes of improving its rate. Just 15 percent of the roughly 28,000 students have requested text message alerts or cell-phone calls during emergencies.
... Campus safety experts point to several factors to explain the lack of interest among students, including feelings of invincibility and reluctance to give out personal information.
Others hesitate to pay the fees - generally a matter of pennies - that some cell phone providers charge to send and receive texts. Colleges generally pay $1 to $4 per enrolled student to the companies that set up the alerts."
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