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Auxiliary Services
Help on the Run
10/1/2007
Students continue to embrace mobility
while auxiliary services move to here,
there, and everywhere.
A junior at a large university returns to campus after spending the summer at home. She has registered for classes, unpacked her stuff in her new dorm room, and is set for the year to begin. Suddenly, her cell phone rings to indicate that she's received a text message. No, the message isn't from her buddies, asking her to join them for pizza; it's from the campus bookstore, informing her that for the next 24 hours, she can receive 20 percent off all merchandise with the school's logo.
This scenario might have been a campus retailer's fantasy two years ago, but not anymore. Nowadays, college and university auxiliary services departments are turning to these types of technologies to move a host of programs and offerings into the mobile environment. Bob Hassmiller, executive director of the National Association of College Auxiliary Services, says that this kind of mobility is the wave of the future—for students and institutions alike.
"The reality is that the students are out there teaching us about the best way to interact," he says. "If we're going to reach out to these kids, we have to do it through the medium they're all on."
As Hassmiller notes, these trends are driven by students themselves. A July 2007 study by Youth Trends indicated that 95 percent of college freshmen come to school with a cell phone or other handheld device, and 78 percent of them have sent a text message in the previous week. As these technologies have become increasingly prevalent, institutions have responded accordingly. Today, every school with an eye to the future is investing in mobility.
But while the tragic shootings at Virginia Tech last April prompted many school administrators to rush to adopt text-messaging services so that they could communicate with students during emergencies, auxiliary services departments are embracing mobile technology more slowly. At last check, only a handful of departments were doing anything with mobile technology. Still, Mark Nelson, digital content strategist for the National Association of College Stores, says the number should grow in the months and years to come.
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