Admissions and Enrollment

Historically, all 26,000 annual applicants to Johnson County Community College (Kan.) received up to three printed communiqués regarding their admissions status. While more information is usually better, the problem with JCCC’s process was that pieces of communication were not sent in chronological order. This created confusion for students.

At first glance, the issue faced by Graziadio School of Business and Management at Pepperdine University (Calif.) may not seem too daunting: a few thousand applications a year and 1,600 students enrolled in 16 programs at five campuses. What’s so tough about that?

There doesn’t seem to be anything higher education can’t break apart and dump into silos. Even technology, which was supposed to help integrate things and eliminate duplicate, wasteful efforts we all loathe, isn’t immune to the practice.

At Iowa State University, the two major providers of online coursework—the College of Engineering and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (LAS)—were engaged in virtually identical technological activities. When rising enrollment numbers clogged registration for on-campus classes, the opportunity to combine services was realized.

Five years of falling application numbers is hard to swallow in good times, but when the economy turns sour, as in recent years, the situation goes from disappointment to outright concern.

Such was the case at Wayne State University, in Detroit. The late-2000’s recession struck Michigan especially hard, and with the state unable to maintain prior funding levels, the university’s graduate admissions woes came into even sharper relief.

Laden with application forms, transcripts, financial aid documents, and more, the admissions function is awash in paperwork. As frustrating as it may be for prospective students who have to compile and send such documentation, imagine being on the receiving end.

Officials at Fresno Pacific University (Calif.) had quite a few reasons to take the institution’s online distance-learning registration system from an external vendor and bring it in-house: Poor customer service and high costs. Insecure and time-consuming methods of communicating with both students and instructors. Duplicate inputting of information. Manual processing of credit card transactions.

Most pressing, though, was a troublesome security breach in 2006 that involved the compromising of a group of credit card numbers.

Faced with a rising applicant population and the desire to continue to provide one-on-one attention to strong student candidates, officials at LIM College in New York City feared declining enrollment if they could not find a way to clone their four admissions counselors or completely revamp the counselors’ role. With the help of consultants from GDA Integrated Services, LIM (formerly known as the Laboratory Institute of Merchandising) managed to do both, in a manner of speaking.

A funny thing happened to the College of William & Mary (Va.) on its way to a more efficient way to determine each of its undergraduate students’ home address.

Dreading the implementation of the solution agreed upon, college officials instead found efficiencies in the process of working together to solve the problem.

College campuses are typically beautiful places. Tree-lined walkways, verdant quads, and stately buildings make for a pleasant place to take a walk.

But for staff at the University of St. Francis (Ill.), too many campus strolls took up time that could be better spent on other tasks - such as tending to prospective students. And the paper files they were delivering from office to office belied the university’s commitment to environmentalism.

It wasn’t as if the admissions office at Boston University did nothing to keep from drowning in paper, working 12-hour days and weekends, and falling behind on customer service.

Administrators engaged in annual streamlining, but with BU’s applicant pool increasing by more than 10,000 over the past five years, it was difficult to keep up. More than 200,000 supporting credentials had to be processed and filed, and 38,000 applications needed to be ready for admissions staff to read by April 1. The entire process was time-consuming and cumbersome.