Campus text alert systems slow to catch on

By Alan Scher Zagier

updated 1:55 p.m. ET Feb. 28, 2008

COLUMBIA, Mo. - 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.

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.

Another industry leader, Blackboard Connect, reports even lower participation — 28 percent for the 300 campuses that use its Connect-Ed emergency alerts.

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.

Other companies who provide the services declined to release detailed enrollment figures to The Associated Press.

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.

"I found out about it a long time ago and never signed up," said Kaitlin Foley, a first-year student at Missouri from Omaha, Neb. "I was too lazy."

The low participation, and fresh concern following the deaths of five Northern Illinois University students by a gunman earlier this month, led University of Missouri president Gary Forsee to issue a new plea.

"Alert systems are only as effective as our ability to make contact with you," he wrote in an e-mail to each of the system's four campuses, encouraging students to enroll immediately.

Even at Virginia Tech, where a gunman killed 32 people and himself last April, four in 10 students still have not signed up for emergency text alerts. The campus also employs other alert methods, including e-mails and online instant messages.

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.

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