The University of Rhode Island, Kingston, has signed on with financial services provider Higher One to handle financial aid refunds due students. It’s the first institution in the state to go with the New Haven, Conn. company and means the school can eliminate the printing, processing and mailing of about 20,000 refund checks a year while providing students with quicker access to their funds.  

Ithaca, N.Y.-based the CBORD Group, which provides campus cards, access control and food service solutions to universities and other industries, plans to move its Farmington, N.Y. training facility to Duluth, Ga. near Atlanta to make its training operations more easily accessible for its more than 6,000 clients.

Additionally, the new facility will provide a blended learning approach supporting both classroom teaching and online learning capabilities.

You decided not to enroll for the summer term which means you’re also not eligible to use the university facilities, such as the school’s recreation center. What’s a student to do? Use a friend’s ID card to gain admission, of course. But at the University of Illinois, such usage could be expensive, both for the non-enrolled student and his friend.

The student’s I-card could be confiscated and both could be barred from the rec center for a period of time. When someone is found to be using another person’s i-card around campus on multiple occasions, a more severe penalty, such as school suspension, may result.

Article One Partners LLC, an online community that works to validate or invalidate patents by offering cash compensation, says it has uncovered prior art in the JSA Technologies patent that covers the account to account transfer of funds between networks via the Internet. That could invalidate the patent that impacts campus card programs that use the Web to reload money to student accounts from other bank accounts.

Article One’s study for the patent held by JSA “uncovered a broad range of prior art references, including two references that each separately can show the patent to be invalid under the strongest level of invalidity evidence, called anticipation,” says the Article One report.

What tips to cope with the downturn can you share?

We know the recession is affecting everyone and is causing budget cuts, some of them massive, at colleges and universities across the country.

CR80News would like to know how such budget cutbacks have affected your campus card office. Have there been layoffs? Shortened hours of operation? And how have these budget reductions affected the services your card office provides students?

Administrators of career colleges and schools can now automate historically manual operations and integrate them with the processing of payments using technology from Heartland Payment Systems in partnership with Training Masters, a consulting and training company for post-secondary career schools.

Arizona State University in Phoenix is providing the identity theft protection services of LifeLock to its campus community. The service is not free but, according to the school’s Web site, the fee is half the normal rate.

LifeLock, based in Tempe, Ariz., performs follow-up services with credit bureaus and related companies after the subscriber reports a suspicion that he or she may be the victim of identity theft. The company also sets fraud alerts with the credit bureaus and requests free credit reports with them, and more.

Read more here.  

Fairleigh Dickinson University, Teaneck, N.J., and campus card solutions provider CardSmith, Doylestown, Penn., have agreed to a multi-year contract renewal of the company’s campus card-services, which includes managing the school’s multi-application Fairleigh 1Card at its Teaneck and Madison, N.J. campuses.

Heartland Payment Systems’ Campus Solutions division has integrated its POS software with FoodPro, a food production, planning and control system from software developer Aurora Information Systems, Cherry Hill, N.J., that will allow campuses to link their back-end menu management and nutritional information to customer purchasing data.

Identification technology from LEGIC Identsystems Ltd was responsible for security within the grounds of the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, site of the 39th St. Gallen economic symposium. Participants from more than 70 countries attended the three-day conference.

LEGIC multi-application technology allowed different applications to be combined on a single card and enabled the participants to move around the university grounds easily and safely.