Registrar/Advising

As if new student orientation wasn’t busy enough, the University of Oregon registrar’s staff was faced with processing thousands of pieces of paper containing Advanced Placement test scores that had arrived not long before the arrival of eager freshmen.

Because Oregon operates on the quarter system, orientation sessions are held throughout July, after AP scores are mailed to the school. That tied up personnel who had to manually enter the scores into Banner and pull files so that each session’s students could be properly advised on which courses to register for.

The academic calendar maintains its own particular cycle and pivots on its own particular axis. Critical dates, such as deadlines for the submission and changing of grades, must be honored. After all, should the calendar lose its adherence, the effects can be negative.

Capella University’s financial aid office faces challenges few other higher institutions do. Unlike universities with traditional four-year students, Capella serves a population of 39,000 students with an average age of 39 and work and family responsibilities that can interfere with their studies. Capella learners are more likely to start and stop their degree pursuits. And with each change in enrollment status comes a need to change financial aid status. Prior to 2009, a single financial aid adjustment took only 15 minutes to process, but 15 days to get to.

The number and quality of personal relationships are frequently what drive college freshmen to remain at a particular college or university. The national average for freshmen retention is right around 75 percent, reports Brian Yates, executive director of the Center for Academic Support and Advising Services (CASAS) at Liberty University (Va.). And yet officials at Liberty, which had a freshman retention rate in line with the national average, felt they could do better.

In these days of instantaneous communication, having to wait for an answer feels anachronistic. If our e-mail isn’t returned within five minutes, we call our colleague to make sure she got it. Technology, it seems, has sped communication as well as slowed it down, as multiple means of messaging?telephones, online channels, face-to-face conversation?crowd one another for attention.

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.