As technology becomes prevalent, enrollment management in higher education grows in complexity. Fortunately, better digital tools are being developed to help institutions with these challenges. Enrollment and admissions benefit from the right digital solutions, especially those that cover the student’s entire journey from prospect to graduate.
This article will explore how college admissions can benefit from digital tools.
The Current State of Enrollment and Admissions
What are the challenges in college admissions that are in urgent need of solutions?
In the digital era, analog processes are creating problems for both the staff and students. Ineffective, clumsy workflows generate friction and difficulty that hinders growth for colleges and universities.
The prospective student finds themselves in an enrollment process that feels incomplete and unhelpful. Parts seem to be missing, forcing the student to contact the staff in order to get answers, yet because of an increasing workload, those answers can take too long to arrive.
The phenomenon of “summer melt” is faced by most schools across the country, in which prospective students lose their motivation to join classes, ultimately failing to complete their enrollment. This “melting” often occurs as a result of cumbersome admission processes that demoralize the student.
The student lifecycle, which encompasses all the interactions they have from admissions to graduation, needs to be simplified for the sake of academic success. It is the institution’s duty to prepare the student for success by reducing the burden of administrative tasks. Digital tools play a key role here.
The Expectation of Modern Students
Today, students are used to smooth, convenient experiences that are easily accessible from their smartphones and other devices. They will expect the same from their academic journey.
These modern-day students pay attention to how innovative institutions are. They are gauging to some extent the quality of the college by how advanced it is in the digital space. Digital tools that support the enrollment and admissions process play a large role in this = early on in the student’s relationship with an institution.
Secure online payments are also part of these expectations. New students expect to be able to comfortably pay for their tuition fees with a couple of clicks. Implementing this feature at your institution will not only enhance the student’s experience but boost the efficiency of the enrollment process and ensure timely payment. Edular enables institutions to offer secure payment methods straight from the custom-branded mobile app.
Instead of working to alter the prospective student’s expectations, successful institutions understand these needs and adapt to them by providing the right solutions.
A Student-Focused Enrollment is Only Possible with Digital Tools
Personalized approaches are not possible in an effective way without the proper use of digital tools. A higher ed institution simply cannot help each prospective student on an individual basis by using traditional strategies.
Edular leverages the power of automation to provide an answer to this challenge. Automated admission workflows anticipate the student’s needs and deliver the support they require in a timely fashion.
Also, the use of synchronous and asynchronous communication channels adds even greater value, alongside automated responses to swiftly clear as many queries and smooth the student’s experience as they enroll.
An effective enrollment process has a comprehensive dimension of support for prospective students, where they are helped by the institution to understand all the different variables: documentation, Financial Aid, payments, scheduling, and more. Achieving this manually, without the assistance of adequate digital tools is impossible.
Genuine Understanding of the Enrollment Process
Do you know exactly where your prospective students are falling out of the admissions pipeline? This is a difficult question to answer but extremely important if we attempt to develop a solution for our institution.
Productive use of enrollment data and digital tools involves observation of how the process is being experienced by both staff and students. This observation is critical, to identify where the friction is taking place and how to solve it with enhanced engagement & workflows.
In order to analyze all the touchpoints in the admission process, it is necessary to have such a process centralized. An all-in-one student relationship management solution like Edular is a great example of this. Edular includes everything that’s necessary for a college to operate. The admissions module helps us to monitor every application in an efficient way.
A Need for Paperless Workflows
Enrollment management has increasingly become more dependent on technology and digital means, a trend that is bound to continue. Why? We are systematically getting rid of paper and that is only possible through the implementation of digital tools.
Paperless enrollment can be a new reality for higher education. This may sound eerie to institutions that haven’t yet implemented digital tools and still rely heavily on physical documentation, however, going paperless with Edularr is easy, affordable, and convenient.
An Affordable Evolution for Enrollment and Admissions
College admissions are being shaped according to the times we live in. Digital tools are filling the gaps and satisfying the students’ expectations with smart solutions. Until recently, implementing such solutions was an expensive undertaking Edular has changed that position.
Edular’s admissions module covers the entire process in a convenient, effective solution. Our cloud-based platform is always available on any device, making it very easy to engage with the student wherever they are and encourage them to complete their enrollment.
Our fully-digital admission workflow will transform your institution’s admissions process, effortlessly signing up and onboarding new students.
