If there is any industry that is ready for an access control revolution, it’s student housing. With so many colleges and universities relying on retrofitting old buildings and building new dormitories to meet attendance influxes, the need for a well-rounded access control system is obvious. Due to being a classic method, combined with the necessity to utilize older buildings, the lock and key have long been used for managing student access to their private domiciles. More recent upgrades have even found ways of converting the student ID card into a way to access campus buildings. 

As we stated in our last article concerning the need for student housing to have an access control revolution, legacy access control doesn’t make the cut anymore. While presenting issues with security, which can have a direct effect on student’s physical and mental well-being, legacy access control also gives a significant headache for campus administrators when it comes to workflow and efficiency. 

This is where Geokey stands to help higher education: our access control solution has the potential to increase security to protect students and workflow efficiency for school administrators. On top of this, Geokey’s integrations are working to make the experience of moving to a smart, mobile-based access control solution as efficient and beneficial as possible. How can Geokey go about solving all of these problems? 

Better Security

Above anything else, the safety of the students should be the top priority. Parents helping their kids choose which higher education institution to live and learn at for most of the year want to ensure they are safe. Having a dorm room as a safe refuge to rest and work from is crucial to the student’s physical and mental well-being. A paper by the United States Department of Education directly linked students’ feeling unsafe as a hindrance to their ability to learn, which is why they are choosing to enter higher education in the first place. 

While they may have once been considered reliable, keys are simply not secure anymore. Keys can easily be lost, stolen, and copied, raising the concern that they are more of a liability than any true form of access control. There is also no way for administrators to keep track of them outside of an honor system, which, when managing thousands upon thousands of keys, can quickly become a problem. You can read more about the liability of keys and fobs in our last article about how mobile access control can revolutionize student housing. 

Geokeys platform also allows university administrators to keep track of when and who opens doors, allowing universities to monitor curfew times better and ensure some accountability for students. It also allows administrators to audit what buildings and doors are accessed, what on-campus amenities are popular, and more. 

Move In/Move Out Hassel

If there is one nightmare that most campuses share, it’s move-in day. Long lines of students wait to receive their packet of papers and the little yellow envelope that holds the collection of keys they will need to be able to navigate campus before finding the dorm room to make their home for the year. With Geokey, we can skip the long line waits and seamlessly automate the key distribution process. 

Geokey’s platform allows administrators to automate the key-giving and retrieval process remotely. With a simple click on the platform, a unique Geokey can be assigned to a student’s phone, ensuring only they have access to whatever doors they need, whether it’s their room, dorm building, or other exclusive buildings/rooms on campus, such as a computer lab. The process is secure thanks to the unique credentials of the assigned Geokey, the phone needing to be within the geofence to activate, and all of the security measures built into the phone. 

While making move-in day several times easier to manage, Geokey also helps automate the move-out process. With keys and fobs, there is a hefty to-do list for universities to keep track of on move-out day:

• Make sure those thousands of keys you distributed are returned.
• Rekey all the locks to ensure stolen and copied keys can’t be utilized the following year.
• Manually updating the firmware on readers so that credentials are up to date.

With Geokey, all of these processes can be accomplished remotely in seconds. Assigned Geokeys are retracted the moment a student checks out: no need to update locks or readers, plus no keys go unaccounted for!

Scalability

Geokey is not a stagnant solution; it was built to grow with your property! Geokey has integrated with many different hardware manufacturers that make products for any property’s needs, whether outdoor gate controls, door handles, deadbolts, or even lock boxes. With products to easily retrofit an existing property and hardwire into new developments, Geokey was built to be scalable. 

The Geokey platform was also built to add and manage new access points and user credentials outside the hardware. Because Geokey is cloud-based, campuses don’t need to worry about managing on-site server rooms: it can all be managed remotely!

Innovation

As companies like Geokey continue to innovate and push the envelope about what access control can accomplish, the pool of features and amenities also continues to grow. With a connection to the cloud and a platform built to manage multiple access points and credentials, the future of access control is bright. Possibilities like integrations with smart thermostats, for example, could allow administrators to set parameters on how energy is utilized in heating or cooling a dorm room and help save money in the long term.

Unlike keys and fobs, which remain as a stagnant means of controlling access points, mobile access control is an ever-expanding field that gives property owners and school administrators an access control solution that is also an amenity. Students will be able to utilize Geokey as a convenient alternative to a ring of keys that leaves them feeling safer in their dorms, while administrators gain a valuable tool to seamlessly automate a lot of processes and, in the long term, save money that can be utilized for scholarships or expansion. Geokey is more than an access control solution: it’s an investment in the future of your campus and your students.