This study examined biometric student tracking systems for enhancing educational safety management in public universities in Rivers State. Three research objectives, three research questions, and three null hypotheses guided the study. The study adopted an analytic descriptive survey research design. The population of the study comprised 88,152 respondents, made up of 88,000 students and 152 security experts drawn from the three public universities in Rivers State, namely the University of Port Harcourt, Rivers State University, and Ignatius Ajuru University of Education. A sample of 550 respondents, comprising 398 students and 152 security experts, was determined using the Taro Yamane formula, while the multistage sampling technique was adopted in selecting the student respondents. The instrument used for data collection was a structured questionnaire titled “Biometric Student Tracking Systems for Enhancing Educational Safety Management in Public Universities Questionnaire”, validated by three experts in Educational Management and in Measurement and Evaluation from Rivers State University. The reliability of the instrument was established using the Cronbach Alpha method, yielding coefficients of 0.88, 0.76, and 0.82 for the three clusters respectively. The three research questions were answered using mean and standard deviation, while the three null hypotheses were tested using z-test statistics at the 0.05 level of significance. The findings revealed that fingerprint recognition systems (grand means of 3.20 for students and 3.12 for security experts), facial recognition systems (grand means of 3.07 for students and 3.12 for security experts), and iris recognition systems (grand means of 3.36 for students and 3.28 for security experts) all enhance educational safety management in public universities in Rivers State to a high extent. Based on the findings, the study recommended among others that university management, the Rivers State Ministry of Education, and the National Universities Commission should prioritise the phased deployment of fingerprint recognition systems as an accessible and cost-effective entry point for biometric safety management.

Keywords: Biometric Systems, Student Tracking, Educational Safety Management, Fingerprint Recognition.