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In today's highly competitive higher education landscape, reliable and effective admissions management is a university's best friend in attracting and enrolling the best students.
It streamlines and improves your student recruitment process, making life easier for applicants, your team, and anyone else involved in the process.
But where do you start finding the best admissions management tool for you?
This guide is designed to help you find the right tool to enhance your applicant experiences, and ultimately increase your enrollment rates. To make this as straightforward and easy to follow as possible, I've broken the guide down into five sections:
By the end of this article, you'll know everything you need to know to compare admissions management tools, and pick the right one for your university.
Admissions management is how you oversee and optimise your recruiting and enrollment of students into your university. It includes a wide range of activities designed to attract, engage, and convert prospective students into engaged students and proud alumni.
In such a competitive industry where universities are fighting for the attention of their ideal candidates, effective admissions management is a must have!
Admissions management in the context of higher education refers to the processes and strategies used by colleges and universities to attract, evaluate, select, and enrol students. It encompasses a wide range of activities designed to manage the flow of prospective students from initial inquiry through to enrollment.
The goal is to attract a diverse and talented student body that aligns with the institution's mission and goals, while also providing a positive and supportive experience for applicants throughout the process.
Here's a quick summary of the core parts of admissions management:
As you probably already know, there's a lot that goes into admission management. And like most things, technology provides some great solutions to these problems.
In fact, an admissions management system is no longer a luxury, but a necessity for any university aiming to attract and enrol the best candidates.
Here’s why every university needs an admissions management system:
An admissions management system improves your entire recruitment process, saving you both time and money. By automating repetitive tasks like document collection, automated email notifications, application tracking and status updates, reviewer assignment, decision notifications, deposit processing and onboarding tasks, your admissions team can focus on more strategic activities.
This not only enhances the admissions experience for students but also reduces the administrative burden on your staff.
It's not just the things we talked about before that these tools can help with. They come with a wide range of extra features that'll make your life easier, and make it easier to recruit the best students:
There are several factors — outside of the efficiencies for the team and students — that drive the need for an admissions management system:
An admissions management system is not just about getting students through the door. It can also play a crucial role in engaging your students in the long-run. From initial application to alumni relations.
By keeping a comprehensive record of interactions between you and your students, you can continue to engage them throughout their academic journey and beyond.
We've already talked about how admissions software gives you a comprehensive solution to improve the student experience from initial enquiry to enrollment and make your processes more efficient. But the benefits extend way beyond that.
For a start it makes it easy to store all your admissions data in one place. Instead of juggling multiple spreadsheets and systems, you can store all your applicant information in one secure database. This streamlines your data management, reducing the risk of errors and making sure you're accurately tracking from initial contact to final decision.
It also helps you to improve your communication with prospective students. You can track the entire communication history, as well as personalise your interactions to build stronger relationships and increase the likelihood of enrollment.
The software's ability to segment your student database also makes it possible for targeting certain communications based on specific criteria, making your marketing efforts far more effective.
Because these tools also provide detailed analytics on applicant conversion levels , they enable you to identify successful strategies and areas that need improvement. This data-driven approach means you can continuously improve your overall student recruitment strategies.
Cost efficiency is another significant benefit — by automating manual tasks you reduce the need for extensive administrative support. This not only cuts staff costs, but also frees up your staff to focus on strategic activities.
We've mentioned a lot of different features and uses for an admissions management tool, but in this section we're going to take a deeper dive into the key features to look out for:
Online Application Portal: A user-friendly application portal is a website where students can check on their application, making the application process faster and easier for both students and universities.
Document Management: Manage all the applicant documents from one place, with secure storage, easy organisation, and quick retrieval of all application materials.
Application tracking and workflow management: Your admissions system should provide a centralised system to monitor application progress, tracking each step one by one.
Application Evaluation and scoring: Handle submissions, review them, and evaluate applicants digitally, removing the reliance on manual processes
Data Segmentation: Segment your database based on criteria like demographics, interests, and engagement levels to personalise your communications, increasing the chances of turning leads into applicants.
Campaign Management and Comms: Customizable email templates and automation tools to manage application status updates, reminders and important deadlines.
Offer management: Tools for managing and communicating admission decisions (acceptance, rejection, waitlisting).
Financial Aid and Scholarship Management: Tools for managing financial aid applications and awards.
Financial management: Including the possibility to process application and tuition fee online payments while creating customised student payment plans.
Data Analytics and Reporting: Comprehensive dashboards and reporting tools to analyse application trends, demographics, yield rates, and other metrics.
As we just covered, an admissions and enrollment management system by itself will provide a wide variety of benefits for both you and your students. But you can get even more benefits if you integrate it with your existing CRM platform or use an integrated admissions and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform like Full Fabric.
By combining your admissions management with your CRM, you get a unified solution that will significantly improve your team's efficiency and effectiveness from the first student interaction through to the last.
Holistic View of Prospective Students: An integrated system allows institutions to maintain comprehensive profiles for each prospective student, combining data from initial inquiries, application progress, interactions, and communications. This holistic view enables more personalised and targeted engagement strategies.
Data-Driven Decision Making: By combining admissions data with CRM analytics, institutions can gain deeper insights into applicant behaviour, preferences, and trends. This data-driven approach helps in refining recruitment strategies, identifying the most effective communication channels, and making informed decisions to improve enrollment outcomes.
Better Resource Management: With integrated data, institutions can better allocate resources and staff time. Insights from the CRM can identify which recruitment activities yield the best results, enabling more effective use of budgets and efforts.
One of these benefits is the seamless flow of information between your departments. This reduces the risk of data silos even further, ensuring all team members have access to up-to-date information, which translates into better collaboration and decision-making.
Additionally, the automation of routine tasks such as email communications, application tracking, and event management frees up staff to focus on more strategic activities, ultimately improving productivity.
An integrated platform also enhances the student experience by providing personalised and timely communications. By combining your CRM and admissions data and analysing it, you can tailor your outreach to meet the specific needs and interests of your prospective students.
This will not only increase the likelihood of conversion, but also the ability to track and analyse these engagement metrics means you can continuously refine your recruitment strategies for better outcomes.
An effective admissions management system is essential if you're aiming to streamline your recruitment processes and enhance student engagement.
By leveraging modern technology and integrated solutions, you can save time, reduce costs, and improve your overall applicant experience.
Key features such as application and document management, data segmentation, evaluation and decision making workflows and personalised communications are crucial to increase your conversion levels and grow the number of quality students. And there are also huge benefits to integrating your admissions and CRM platforms to further improve the efficiency and collaboration during your admissions and recruiting processes.
By embracing these tools you'll not only boost enrollment rates, but you'll also ensure long-term student success and satisfaction.
The development and maintenance of an in-house system is a complex and time-consuming task. Full Fabric lets you turn your full attention to maximizing growth and performance.
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