The American Society for Engineering Education, the pre-eminent authority on the education of engineering professionals, knew that associations for other disciplines had great success with Liaison-powered Centralized Application Services (CAS). Nathan Kahl, ASEE’s managing director for communications and society advancement, thought it might be time to offer his member engineering schools the same benefits.
After all, ASEE’s mission is clearly stated as one that should “advance innovation, excellence, and access at all levels of education for the engineering profession.” Enter Liaison International, the leading provider of higher education admissions management and enrollment marketing solutions. Liaison, whose tagline is “Build a Better Class,” is the innovative force behind more than 40 services for associations and disciplines ranging from business and architecture to public health and nursing, so the partnership made sense.
“Liaison’s solution is mobile friendly, easy to use and has been fine-tuned over its two decades in use,” Kahl says. “It’s also worldwide, so we knew a Liaison-powered CAS would broaden the engineering applicant pool. International students are already drawn to engineering schools, but Liaison is going to help ASEE draw the best talent from around the world while simultaneously making it easier for those students to find the programs they want.”
CAS as an avenue for data-driven decisions
EngineeringCAS provides benefits for programs, admissions offices, applicants and the discipline as a whole. It begins with streamlining admissions workflows—including review processes and evaluations—so admissions offices can free themselves of burdensome manual tasks and instead focus on fostering relationships with their prospective students.
Engineering programs that utilize a CAS can reach a broader pool of applicants, and by taking advantage of Liaison’s enterprise-strength back-end tool WebAdMIT, their admissions offices can begin collecting and delivering real data about national enrollment and recruitment trends. This data in turn will help facilitate more accurate enrollment projections and help guide the subsequent creation of data-driven recruitment strategies.
But it’s not just about forward-looking plans. “Participants will be able to really tailor the incoming cohort for what they want,” Kahl says. “If they want to increase certain characteristic types in that incoming cohort, they can look for that in their expanded set of students. Besides shaping the class, it will provide schools with some invaluable recruiting data.”
Kahl says that student diversity in engineering graduate programs is important, and believes that EngineeringCAS will help schools understand the minority applicant pool and identify strategies to recruit and retain these students. He says: “It’s been a decadeslong and ongoing fight to diversify the engineering profession.”
Student benefits
Kahl likes that EngineeringCAS is a single, easy-to-use application. Engineering applicants can research programs and then utilize one online application to apply to all programs of interest.
That means that students can now focus on researching schools rather than spending time filling out multiple applications. “Whether it’s geography, faculty-student ratio, research topics, lab spaces or makerspaces, students are going to be able to do one-stop shopping to identify different schools that fit them best,” says Kahl.
Like ASEE, Liaison is committed to promoting access to education and so has built in tools that simplify requests for official transcripts and easy ways to upload unofficial ones. It also has a platform for requesting and packaging letters of recommendation. Students can get status updates and support as needed to guide them through the application process.
“Having that single port of entry is really beneficial,” Kahl says.
Perfect for engineers, who demand innovation, efficiency and access, too.
Want more information about EngineeringCAS? Visit engineeringcas.org
