The Wall Street Journal - 06.03.2020

R10| Friday, March 6, 2020 THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.

JOURNAL REPORT|WORKPLACE TECHNOLOGY

O

n campuses around the country

today, college students are

watched, tracked and managed

by a growing concentration of

technologies.

Universities are recording students’ faces

with video surveillance cameras, tracking

their movements with GPS and monitoring

their messages on social media and email.

They are detailing students’ study habits

through digital textbooks, recording when

they enter buildings, logging their presence

in class, the library and even the football

game. All of these relatively new tracking

technologies are in addition to years-old sys-

tems that leverage students’ IDs to monitor

how frequently individuals are entering

gyms, dorms and cafeterias.

The interlocking layers of observation are

typically used to help keep students safe, en-

gaged and moving efficiently toward gradua-

tion. Some, for example, help schools figure out

in real time who is showing up for class and

who is at risk of slipping through the cracks.

But what may be intended as protection

can take away some of the freedom college

students traditionally have enjoyed as they

take on new responsibilities and test bound-

aries. Privacy advocates also worry about

colleges having too much power. None of

these tracking technologies is unusual, but

because so many are brought to bear in such

a concentrated fashion, the overall impact is

unsettling to some people.

“In most other settings, the collection of

information about the population may be dif-

fused across many different entities,” says

Adam Schwartz, a senior attorney at the

Electronic Frontier Foundation, a California-

based nonprofit that advocates for privacy

rights and free speech. “The supermarket

knows what the customer eats. The bookstore

BYDOUGLASBELKIN

On College

Campuses,

No Place to

Hide for

Students

Increasingly, schools are using

technology to keep tabs on where

students are and how they’re doing

knows what the customer reads. The

police know what faces appeared near

what police surveillance cameras. But

on a college campus, the college is the

supermarket, the bookstore and the

police department.”

Here is a look at some of the moni-

toring equipment that is now in use at

campuses across the country.

On campus—and online

Colleges begin to track prospective

students before they even enroll. By mea-

suring how much time applicants spend

on their school websites, admissions offi-

cers gauge how interested a student is in

attending. Students who show more in-

terest are more likely to get accepted.

Once a student is enrolled, ID cards

leave traces at cash registers and en-

trances to dorms, gyms and cafeterias.

That data can be tracked to observe

habits and even friend groups. When a

student logs onto a school’s computer

system, administrators can follow them

across the Web observing which pages

they browse, says Alan Rubel, a profes-

sor at the University of Wisconsin-Mad-

ison Information School.

Tech companies pitch new ways to

track students all the time, Prof. Rubel

says. Last year he reviewed a pitch from

a company that wanted to access the

cameras and microphones of every stu-

dent’s mobile phone in case of an emer-

gency like a mass shooting, he says. The

devices would act like a hive, collecting

and feeding information to a central au-

thority which could then direct students

away fromdanger.

It is now common for colleges to be

able to locate students through their

phones, with scores of schools hiring

companies to monitor everywhere stu-

dents go on campus. These schools

want to know whether students are

showing up to class, studying in the li-

brary or hanging out on the quad.

In a pilot program for the California

State University system, Sacramento

State University this semester gave first-

year students the option to connect

through their phones to a program that

tracks where they go. The program, pro-

vided by Degree Analytics, can be set up

to flag patterns in an individual’s behavior

that might increase their risk of dropping

out. Of the school’s 3,800 first-year stu-

dents, about 500 agreed to participate.

In the classroom

Another fast-growing technology

is sensors that check attendance by

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connecting with the Bluetooth signals

on students’ phones when they arrive in

classrooms. Some 37 schools have con-

tracted with one provider of sensors,

SpotterEDU. Company co-founder Rick

Carter, a former college-basketball

coach, says his inspiration for the ser-

vice came from having to make sure his

players attended class so they would be

eligible to play in games.

The University of Mississippi is pay-

ing $10,000 a year to SpotterEDU for its

sensors to track the attendance of 150

student athletes. Bob Baker, the senior

athletic director in charge of making

sure athletes graduate, says his depart-

ment used to send students to individ-

ual classrooms to check up on players.

Now the app generates a report for

each student. If a student is not in class,

the app records them as absent and

doesn’t know where the student is. It

sends an email to his or her academic

counselor, who reaches out to the stu-

dent to find out why they were absent

or tardy, says Mr. Baker.

At sports events

About 40 colleges are using an

app called FanMaker toboost student

attendance at sports events. Sensors in

the student-seating sections detect not

only when students with the app are at

the game, but how long they stay.

Such information can be valuable for

universities with big athletic programs. If

few students attend a nationally televised

game, or leave at halftime, the school

looks less attractive to prospective stu-

dents. In return for filling seats at such

games, students who use the optional

app can get rewards such as tickets to

more important games.

In smartbooks and

portals

Web-connected smartbooks and portals

through which students access classes

and communicate with their schools are

helping professors monitor student per-

formance in real time. Learning-manage-

ment systems and other such tools pro-

vide a kind of dashboard instructors can

use to see how much reading their stu-

dents have done. Such information can

alert faculty and academic advisers well

before the end of a semester if a stu-

dent is in danger of flunking a class.

Some observers worry that academic

advisers using such tools could be too

quick to counsel a student struggling

early in a class to take a less ambitious

academic path, before the student has a

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chance to fix the problem.

“There is all sorts of pressure to grad-

uate students, which is generally good,”

says Brett McFarlane, an associate direc-

tor at the National Academic Advising

Association, which advocates for aca-

demic advisers. “The problem comes

when a decision is based not on the stu-

dent but on what the institution is being

rewarded for. That is when you can start

to get dysfunctional behavior.”

On social media

Several companies have developed

algorithms to monitor social-media feeds

in and around a school for signs that a

student may be a danger to themselves

or someone else. If language is identified

that meets certain criteria, the company

sends the school a notification that in-

cludes the post itself, and it’s up to the

school to interpret the message.

The University of Virginiauses a

company called Dataminr, forwhich it

pays $19,000 a year, according to UVA

Police Sgt. Benjamin Rexrode. Dataminr

scours social media to alert campus po-

lice if an emergency is unfolding and it is

being reported on social media.

In public spaces

Campus surveillance cameras are

now widespread. PurdueUniversity in

West Lafayette,Ind., has about 500 cam-

eras around campus. The campus police

monitor 300 of them, mostly in parking

garages and outside spaces. Cameras are

in dorms, academic buildings and other

locations as well. Images are stored for

45 says, campus police say.

When theUniversity of California,

Los Angeles in 2018 considered pairing

AI-enhanced facial-recognition technology

with its campus surveillance cameras,

students protested with town hall meet-

ings and a letter-writing campaign.

“People were really worried about

what would happen to these images.

Who would store them? Who would have

the legal right to them?” says UCLA se-

nior Salvador Martinez, who helped orga-

nize the pushback.

Last month, the administrative vice

chancellor at UCLA, Michael Beck, an-

nounced that the school would drop the

effort. “We have determined that the po-

tential benefits are limited and vastly

outweighed by the concerns of our cam-

pus community,” he said.

Mr. Belkinis a Wall Street Journal

reporter in Chicago. He can be

reached [email protected]. PETER OUMANSKI

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