Starting next semester students will have less to worry about when they do their laundry.
During winter break, laundry machines in dorms will be rewired so students can use Points Plus to pay for laundry expenses. This means that students will swipe the thick stripe on the back of their identification cards to do laundry, rather than the thin vending stripe they currently use.
Tufts Community Union Historian Ed Kalafarski said the vending stripe on students' ID cards is called a junk stripe, and that money is currently "physically put on the card." In the new system, however, all transactions will be done online.
"Starting with laundry, we're migrating from offline to online," Patricia Klos, Director of Dining and Business Services, said.
The new laundry pay machines will have online readers that will register payments on an online database, Klos said, eliminating a need for intermediate wiring - the current machines located in Dewick-MacPhie and the campus center which students use to transfer Points Plus or cash to vending dollars.
Students will be able to transfer their Vending Points to Points Plus for free, Kalafarski said. Points Plus can currently be transferred to Vending Points, but not the other way around.
Under the current system, if an ID card is lost, its Vending Points are lost as well. Adding Vending Points to the central Points Plus database will provide a record of the amount on the card.
Kalafarski said the new system for laundry is the first step in updating the points system. "Clearly, there's more that can be done," he said. "The next step is letting people add points online."
Klos said Dining Services has looked into an online system. "We would love to be able to offer that," she said. The project is in an interim stage of planning, and no system would be available next semester.
Installing a system that would allow students and parents to add points online using a credit card is more complex than the change in laundry payment, Klos said, because it will require cooperation between the Bursar for billing and finance purposes and personnel at Tufts Computing and Communications Services.
The Student Information System - which allows students to register for courses, request transcripts and view their bursar bill - is not designed to provide this type of service and would require custom programming, Klos said.
Dining Services is looking to see whether a third party would be more appropriate. She cited the software company, JSA Technologies as a possible candidate.
The program offered by JSA is called Student Link. The online service allows students and parents to pay for points online using a credit card, check balances at any time, and view a transaction record.
"Basically, it's a web interface," Andrew Ripley, a sales representative of the company said. "We would connect to your server and manage all the transactions from here in Texas," he said.
The service cuts costs for universities by eliminating most billing expenses, Ripley said. Harvard University, Ohio State University and the University of Southern California use Student Link.
Klos said adopting a system would be a complex issue. "It's not just the cost, which would be tens of thousands of dollars," she said. "But different universities have different approaches to security."
Kalafarski, who has been working on the project for over a year, originally described the new system as a "unified points system."
Since Dining Dollars will still be kept separate, Klos called the compromise a "simplified points system." Dining Services does not plan to combine Dining Dollars with Points Plus.
The University needs to keep Dining Dollars separate, Klos said, to ensure enough money goes to Dining Services. With a unified points system, students would not have to commit a certain amount of money to dining, which would make operating the Commons, Hotung Caf?©¬ Brown and Brew and the two dining halls more difficult.
Dining Dollars are also exempt from the Massachusetts meals tax - a five percent tax on food and beverages. Students who pay for meals on campus with cash have to pay tax.
Sophomore Jake Weitzen said he appreciated the change. "It's much more convenient to have everything on one stripe," he said.
A new name for the Points Plus account is also being discussed. Kalafarski suggested Jumbo Bucks but he said he is open to other ideas.
Kalafarski said he was optimistic about future improvements. "The system was horrendously complex," he said. "Clearly it needs to be upgraded. The Class of 2010 should never have to know we had fifteen different kinds of points."
