At Penn State, credentials and ID are used to verify the identity of all students and faculty for a great variety of purposes. Penn State students and faculty must present a university-issued ID to access certain buildings, enter their dormitories, and even to access their meal plan money or make purchases at certain campus vendors.

As of September 15th, 2025, Penn State IT and the Office of Physical Security issued a university-wide deactivation of any duplicate credentials. This means that those with both a physical ID card and a mobile ID credential have had their physical ID cards rendered entirely unusable.

Penn State's reasoning for this action is a broader initiative started in January to "simplify user experiences" and "enhance the security of University resources."

Simply put, this achieves neither of these goals. The only effect as of current is great inconvenience on Penn State students and faculty, and an even greater dependence on mobile devices when trying to access university buildings and resources.

Those who do not want to use mobile ID will have to pay a $20 fee to have a replacement physical card. This is simply unacceptable; students and faculty should not have to pay additional money for a service which was once guaranteed for free as part of their enrollment or participation at Penn State University.

Lastly, despite being now the only available credential for the vast majority of Penn State students, mobile ID fails to accurately display even basic information such as account balance.

The deactivation of physical card credentials and the new "no duplicate credentials" policy will likely have the following detrimental effects on students and faculty:

• Those who seek to reduce their screen time will face additional hurdles due to increased dependence on mobile devices.
• Those who have older phones with aging batteries will often find themselves having to resort to temporary access keycards or public charging stations, both of which are a limited and inconvenient resource at many Penn State campuses.
• Those with phones that lack the hardware to interact with NFC scanners, and those who are unable or unwilling to utilize Apple's or Google's app services will not be able to make use of mobile ID.
• Phone theft, though already incredibly disruptive to a student or faculty's ability to perform properly at Penn State, will now be absolutely crippling to one's ability to access buildings, access student resources, or even to make purchases at Penn State.
• The increased prevalence of students and faculty being locked outside dormitories and buildings with dead phone batteries may normalize the practice of "piggybacking," where one person slips in the door as another scans their credentials. This is a much more serious security risk than any imposed by duplicate credentials, and risk is largely shouldered by students, when bad actors attempt to enter dormitories.

With even just a few days of this new policy taking effect, students and faculty have already begun to complain and develop grievance. It is crucial that we urge Penn State administration as soon as possible to roll back these changes and to revoke this misguided policy before this becomes the new normal.