My wife and I attended college together back in the 1980s, during the era of huge hair, mixtapes, parachute pants, neon colors, shoulder pads, and matching denim jeans and jackets. I embraced two of those fads, though I’ll let you guess which ones. Thankfully, parachute pants weren’t one of them.
Another thing we had a lot of was physical contact with objects, such as doorknobs and ID cards. Any time we wanted to purchase meals, enter a dorm or academic building after hours, use the gym, ride a bus, or attend an on-campus concert or comedy show, we had to pull out a plastic card to establish our identity. The cards were easy to lose, and we often had our arms filled with books, which made it a hassle to fish them out of our wallets (or our pockets—jeans in the ’80s were very tight). Plus, since we had to regularly hand the cards over to cashiers, bus drivers, resident assistants and librarians, we were vulnerable to catching a lot of colds.
Our children are now in college—our daughter is finishing grad school for occupational therapy, while our son is earning his undergrad degree in new communications media—and things are very different for them. They don’t have to keep handing IDs to everyone, as there are card slots everywhere for them to identify themselves automatically. They also have key fobs available to them, and they’ve been increasingly able to use smartphone apps as well. They are the app generation. For them, the idea of having to pull a laminated card out of a wallet or pocket and physically hand it to someone multiple times per day is quaint, and further evidence that their parents are old.
A new school year looms, and thousands of college students will be using Near Field Communication (NFC)-based mobile student IDs, thanks to a new rollout from Apple utilizing the Apple Wallet app. Those attending Sheridan College or the University of New Brunswick will be the first in Canada to benefit from the technology, and the company is expanding the service to many U.S. schools as well, including Auburn University, Northern Arizona University, the University of Maine, New Mexico State University and more.
This fall, in fact, the University of Alabama will exclusively issue mobile IDs to its students if they own eligible devices. The students will store their digital ID on their iPhone or Apple Watch, which will enable them to make purchases and gain building access. “Many universities are increasingly moving away from plastic cards and taking a mobile-first approach to their student ID programs,” Apple explained on its website, “allowing students to use mobile student IDs in Wallet to complete any action that would have previously required a plastic ID card—both on and off campus.”
As a journalist who covers Internet of Things technologies, I find this innovative. And as a father during a pandemic, I’m grateful that students will be better protected from COVID-19 since they’ll be able to avoid physical contact with anything but their phones, reducing the potential for virus transmission. (NFC can’t stop them from having physical contact with each other, of course, but that’s another topic entirely.) With the Delta variant surging and many Americans refusing to get vaccinated despite the importance of doing so to stem the disease’s spread, it’s more vital than ever to keep people as protected as possible. Mobile contactless technologies play a large role in that effort.
Apple says April 2021 was a turning point, as students used mobile IDs more than plastic cards for the first time since the company launched that option in Wallet. Mobile IDs allow students to access events, libraries, residence halls, academic buildings and recreation centers, as well as pay for items in shops, dining halls and the many vending machines available on today’s campuses. They don’t need to worry about losing cards, eliminating the cost and annoyance of requesting replacements, and with card theft no longer a concern, building security becomes strengthened.
I wish we’d had this type of technology back in the 1980s. It would have been more useful than friendship bracelets, healthier than endless spritzes of hairspray, more versatile than hacky-sacks, less of a headache than boomboxes, more convenient than fanny packs and easier to comprehend than Rubik’s Cubes. I doubt it would have prevented the mullet… but, then, technology can’t solve every problem.
Rich Handley has been the managing editor of RFID Journal since 2005. Outside the RFID world, Rich has authored, edited or contributed to numerous books about pop culture. You can contact Rich via email.