Article written by Stephanie Onofri
It’s no secret: University and College admissions are a huge pain in our behinds. Whether we are a prospective student, a parent, or Higher Education personnel, the process is tedious and long, requiring students to chase after transcripts and GRE scores, and keeping education departments on their toes as they scramble to keep accurate student records. Across the country, educational institutions are adopting electronic document management solutions to stay abreast of the constantly fluctuating student enrollment process. Graduate admission processing, financial aid and registrar records, and course credit transfers are some of the major areas in which these types of paperless document and records management solutions have proven most beneficial and cost-effective.
In my college days, I moved around a lot. Granted, I couldn’t really stay still in one place for too long without developing an alarming amount of muscle twitches and speech pattern defects. But this isn’t the reason I moved around a lot. Like many college students who are on the brink of the rest of their painstaking lives, I needed to find the right environment and discipline of study in which to flourish. This required multiple credit transfer processes, painfully tedious financial aid evaluations, and lengthy course change approvals which often skew the first few crucial days of the semester.
Anyone who has experienced this knows the importance of accurate and timely course transfers into the new course program or institution of choice.
Now, as Industries transfer more and more of their departmental processes to Enterprise Content Management solutions, I couldn’t help but wonder how such a system would have benefitted the institutions (which shall remain nameless) with which I was acquainted in my days of college football games, sleepless study nights, and the occasional, inevitable ramen noodle binge.
Here’s what I found:
- Automated Admissions processing – Universities who have adopted an ECM solution have automated the greater part of their admission process through streamlining electronic workflows and auditing student documents for accuracy and missing information.
- Faster student transcript data capture and credit transfers – Through automated data capture and workflow, ECM shaves time off course credit transfers and ensures student satisfaction.
- Instant access to all financial aid records on a single interface – Since ECM integrates with student information systems (SIS), no documentation is lost or misplaced. In addition, once all paper files have been converted to electronic formats, the electronic document management system allows the user to access multiple student records at once, instead of having to fish for them one by one in the file cabinets.
- GO TEAM GREEN! – Conversion of paper documents to electronic format provides a number of benefits including saving the institution huge paper and storage costs, the confidence of knowing that documents are securely accessed only by authorized parties, and, quite simply, the totally cool appeal of being a “green” institution.
Needless to say, in addition to the exponential improvements on departmental processes, going “paperless” also harbors a sort of trendy appeal. Is your institution snagging the best and hippest university candidates and keeping them satisfied? Contact our software solutions specialist to find out how to get ahead of the curb! For more info on ECM, you can also download our Ultimate Guide to ECM below!
