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April 26, 2007, 03:03 PM ET
Trying to Profiteer From the Virginia Tech Tragedy
At colleges across the country, information-technology officials complain they are being bombarded with pitches from companies offering emergency-alert systems, sometimes at inflated prices and sometimes with designs that are useless for emergencies like the shootings at Virginia Tech.
"Everyone has gotten a lot more calls than usual this week, and they are pretty annoyed about it," says Marc Eichen, vice president for information technology at Massachusetts Bay Community College. "Maybe it's good ol' American capitalism, but it seems rapacious to me."
One chief information officer reported that a company offering to blast text messages to students via cellphones in an emergency had upped their price from 40 cents per student last week to $1 per student this week.
Another official said a company pitched a text-alert service that was based on students signing up voluntarily, and had no ability to use the college's complete database of cellphone numbers.
"It's caveat emptor out there," Eichen says. "An inexperienced CIO, getting a lot of pressure from the college president to 'do something now,' might do a deal with the first company at the door, and that company might not be able to perform the needed job in a real emergency. That's a worrisome scenario."
Not everyone is trying to take advantage. Some college officials reported that Connect-ED, a company offering voice and text alerts to some 75 institutions, actually cut their prices. "We felt a responsibility not to abandon these campuses," says Rebecca Foster, a company spokesman. "Many had no money left in their budgets at this time of year but were under a lot of pressure to do something immediately. So we became flexible on our pricing." --Josh Fischman
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