this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2023
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I went to college before it was app everything and our student id's were smartcards. Dining plan associated with the smartcard. Just stick it in the reader when you show up and you're good. You could put cash on your card then use it for the vending machines or laundry or any little incidental on campus. If you needed cashed added to your account, your parents could go online and do it, or you could. That was the only online component. The entire system just worked without any fuss or privacy concerns or anything.
Our university made it so anything you can buy with the card was like 20-50% more expensive tho. I usually never bought anything on campus because of it :/
Yeah at my alma mater the “dining dollars” only covered pretty overpriced crap.
My degree program -> required to be full time and live on campus in specific dorm buildings-> the specific dorm buildings required you to purchase one of the two highest meal plans.
So just to complete specific programs you had to spend $1,000+ a semester on a meal plan for pretty terrible food that you would never see the value of, even if you didn’t want it.
And on top of that, you’re likely paying far more for all of it in the long term via student loan interest.
That made it all the more infuriating to me when my limited set amount of “dining dollars” in the plan (usually $100) only covered stuff like a $4 bag of fruit snacks or a $3 snack-sized bag of potato chips. This was back in 2015 too.
For profit higher education is greaaat.
Almost without any privacy concerns. When I went to college around the turn of the millennium, I worked at the main food court on campus. We had a card system just like you're describing. When we swiped the student's card to pay for their meal, their student ID would come up on my screen. Their student ID was their SSN. Back then the first three digits of a person's SSN was based on the state they lived in when they got their number assigned. For most people that was when they were a baby or at least very young, and for most people that's the state they did most of their growing up in. I used to have most of the codes memorized, so when I'd swipe someone's card and see that they had an SSN from someplace that wasn't the state where the university was, I'd mention it. "Oh, hey, you're from Ohio? My aunt lives in Ohio."
Yikes! That was a privacy nightmare. We were fortunate that the university assigned a personal ID on enrollment. I think the only place that had access to the social was the front office. Of course some of the students worked at the front office. I hope they were required to sign an NDA.
Yeah it worked this was in the late 90s except your ID was a swipe card and it really only worked on food. You also had to go to the business office with a check to deposit more funds. Online was still dial up for most people.
Yeah, same but they also worked as bus passes.
That's still how it works where I am, but the little devices to renew your card every semester are broken half the time, so yay
I like this too because it doesn't require you to turn on NFC which I feel like drains power.
I mean, it does. But it’s such an insignificant amount you’d never notice.
If you got an hour of use out of your phone for instance, you’d only lose about 18 seconds runtime.
Huh, today I learned. I'd always assumed it was like Bluetooth or location.