As students “swirl” through higher education, taking classes at multiple institutions either consecutively or simultaneously, the need for institutions to quickly receive and process transcripts becomes more important. To comply with accreditation standards, Houston Community College was supposed to have all transcripts evaluated by the end of a student’s first semester, a goal their paper-based process was not allowing them to meet in 2008.
Articles: Administration & Management
3/27/2012
At some point during the year, nearly every one of the 4,400 students at Ogeechee Technical College (Ga.) will have a reason to visit the college’s Student Affairs Center (SAC). This central administrative unit houses Admissions, Financial Aid, the Registrar, and Career Services. In 2011, 24,869 student appointments were made with as many as 320 students a day visiting during peak times; during quieter periods, between 80 and 100 students are seen.
3/27/2012
Buying stationery supplies, scientific equipment, and office furniture hardly qualifies as capital expenditures. But shop for enough pens, beakers, and chairs, and the amounts add up.
3/27/2012
Creating a one-stop student services center in 2005 at Wilkes University (Pa.) seemed like a good idea at the time. These popular organizational structures have typically been a cost-cutting measure introduced to allow educational institutions to do more with less. At Wilkes, a one-stop shop was created by co-locating the services of the Registrar, Financial Aid, Admissions Processing, and Cashier.
3/26/2012
Buying computers for a college campus is no small feat. In addition to requisitioning and specing them before the purchase, there is the configuration and instillation after the purchase to worry about.
3/26/2012
Sometimes increasing efficiency requires cross-functional teams, complex software solutions, and weeks of training and implementation. And sometimes it’s as simple as replacing a clipboard and sign-in sheet with a commonly used program, such as Microsoft Excel.
3/26/2012
Like most academic institutions, the Mercer University School of Law (Ga.) generates a lot of paperwork. However, the Dean’s Office team knew there had to be a better way to process and store key financial and administrative files than to simply fill banker’s boxes and stack them in the school’s dingy attic and basement. That attic was almost completely filled, anyhow.
3/26/2012
Until a few years ago, every January, staff in the Human Resources and Payroll department at George Mason University (Va.) began the arduous task of printing and mailing more than 10,000 W-2 statements for faculty, staff, and student workers.
3/26/2012
Like many institutions over the last several years, Salisbury University (Md.) paid handsomely for an enterprise resource planning system. Also like many institutions, Salisbury discovered that while its ERP solution handled larger functions just fine, there were gaps in the system—in areas such as housing, medical and athletic records, course evaluation, and human resources search management—that required the purchase and implementation of third-party products to fill.
3/26/2012
Although the University of Virginia has approximately 200,000 living alumni, until recently, the university was only communicating electronically with a fraction of them; 43,000 had email addresses on record. Because the university consists of so many campus organizations—11 schools and 30 foundations—creating and managing a central alumni database for online communications proved difficult. Each school and foundation managed its own list of email recipients.
3/26/2012
Students have enough on their plates without having to worry about properly receiving their work-study hours from their financial aid packages. But, paper time cards and siloed systems were making life difficult for students and staff alike at Catawba College (N.C.).
3/26/2012
Sometimes Plan A and Plan B need to be implemented simultaneously before you can determine which is the better way to go all along. Increasing enrollment and soaring numbers of financial aid recipients at Lakeland Community College (Ohio) had combined with plunging state support to place an enormous burden on support staff who simply couldn’t keep up with students’ requests for help during peak times.
3/26/2012
New students understandably want to get going in their studies as soon as possible. So as soon as a new student’s data was recorded in SunGard Banner, its ERP system, NorthWest Arkansas Community College issued a temporary password providing access to an online portal with class information, registration capabilities, and so on.
3/26/2012
As the University Business editorial team began judging the entries for this first round of the Models of Efficiency program’s third year, a few things became clear. One is that, with so much practice, we are becoming all the more efficient in spotting the great efficiency success stories.
3/26/2012
An unprecedented and powerful confluence of forces—political, economic, public policy, regulatory, technological, and consumer choice—will drastically reshape the landscape of higher education governance in coming years. These forces will cause a seismic shift in governance and accountability for American colleges and universities. Board members will need additional skills and competencies for leading their institutions through the more treacherous terrain of a new governance world.
