eWeek: A year after a Virginia Tech gunman killed 33 fellow students, academic officials have scrambled to deploy emergency alert systems featuring consolidated voice, text messaging and e-mail. Anxious administrators fretting over faculty and student safety have spent millions on mass notification alerts.

Now, if only students would use the systems.

"Enrollment [in the program] is a constant problem," said Raju Rishi, co-founder and chief strategy officer for Rave Wireless, which has approximately 50 colleges and universities under contract for the company's emergency alert system. "Not all schools make it mandatory."

A recent Associated Press survey showed that among 500 campuses using the popular e2campus system, approximately 40 percent of the students signed up for the service. Rishi said the industry average is about a 25 percent enrollment rate.

Tragedy, unfortunately, has a way of dramatically jumping the enrollment rate. At Virginia Tech, a new emergency alert system instituted after the shootings drew 20,000 students and faculty, about half the school's population. When an armed person was spotted on the St. John's campus in New York City, the school had about 2,100 enrollments in its alert system. The day after, the number jumped to more than 6,500.

"After Virginia Tech, everyone came out of the woodwork offering text messaging systems," Rishi said. "There were many, many buyers." Rishi said more than 95 percent of college students arrive on campus with a cell phone and "text messaging is the tool by which they organize their lives."

Alerting students is nothing new for colleges and universities, although they have been slow to embrace new technologies. For years, schools' alert systems primarily involved leaving mass voice mails through dormitory PBX systems. The system did little good for students who were out of their rooms.

"Students today not only bring their own cell phones, they bring their own e-mail," Rishi said. "They tend to auto forward their school e-mail to their personal e-mail. They tend not to use the school's website creating a major communications digital divide."

"What they can't do is bring their own portal," he added.

Rave provides schools a fully redundant infrastructure that includes six data centers, multiple SMS aggregators with automated failover capabilities and advanced monitoring systems that verify alert delivery across the major mobile carriers. Rave delivers mobile text alerts to all mobile carriers across the U.S.

"The school gets on one of our hosted serversand decides what population of the school it wants to reach," Rishi said, noting that his New York-based company can send up to 9,000 text messages per minute. For voice messages, Rave can pump out 8,000 messages a minute. "Text messaging is not for everyone…like parents," he said.

Or, apparently, not all students when it comes to an emergency alert.