Page 43 - Campus Technology, January/February 2019

Photos: Maryville University
43
CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY | January/February 2019
2018
Personalizing the Admissions Process to Meet Diverse Student Needs
Maryville University created an “application for anything” tool that allows schools to easily customize admissions applications for specific applicants or programs.
Category: Student Systems & Services Institution: Maryville University
Project: Enterprise Application Solution for Yield Project lead: Kathleen Lueckeman,
chief innovation officer
Tech lineup: Huron Consulting Group, Salesforce.org
ADMISSIONS IN HIGHER education is in the midst of a sea change. While most schools have traditionally concentrated on recruiting high school seniors, student demographics have evolved — and the recruitment pools and processes around them have grown more complex. Colleges and universities are dealing with applications for online and residential undergraduate programs, graduate students, executive and continuing education professionals, international students and more.
Yet despite those diverse needs, admissions offices are
often forced to settle for a one-size-fits-all software solu- tion purchased at the organizational level. “Most of the sys- tems have been built for that 80 percent rule of recruiting freshmen — and the rest of us had to live with that and create shadow processes to manage other populations,” explained Kathleen Lueckeman, chief innovation officer at Maryville University (MO). “If you have multiple popula- tions all trying to use the same solution, you have to develop workarounds, but who wants to be inefficient?”
To address this issue, Maryville not only designed its own admissions software, but also created what Lueckeman calls an “application builder”: a free, open source “applica- tion for anything” solution that allows schools to customize applications according to the requirements of a particular applicant or program.
The Enterprise Application Solution for Yield (EASY) was developed on the Salesforce.org platform and uses the Salesforce Community Cloud for its application portal. Lueckeman noted that Salesforce’s charitable arm pro- vides 10 free licenses of its Enterprise Edition to all nonprofit
Kathleen Lueckeman