Automate Student Admissions—Free Up Time and Resources in 2024

If you work on an admissions team or collaborate with those who do, you know how many plates are spinning at once. From building student relationships, to answering personalized questions about the admission process, to reviewing student applications—it's a lot for counselors to manage individually.

Fortunately, the modern world of admissions is going digital—and automatic. In a recent survey, Inside Higher Ed highlights the effectiveness of digital admissions touchpoints when working with prospective students and getting them to enroll after the initial application process. 

But there’s only so much time in a day, forcing educational institutions to use resources productively, leveraging technology to its ultimate potential. If you’ve searched for ways to improve and accelerate your admissions process, automation could be the missing link.

Finetune Your Admission Process

For your college or university to improve admissions, you need to look at the whole system. Improvements must be available and realistic for both student applicants and the staff members who oversee the process from start to finish.

In many cases, enhancing the admissions funnel includes making the following changes and tweaking multiple applications to improve efficiency.

Process Digitalization

In a higher education admission context, digitalization looks like migrating most of the inquiry, intake, and application processes over to comprehensive digital steps. This allows colleges to streamline processes and reduce costs associated with manual paper systems. Additionally, digitalization restructures the student experience and provides institutions with a more complete view of all applicants.

The switch from manual data entry to digital has already taken place in most education institutions, but some lingering steps (like lead intake at physical recruitment fairs) may still require paper. Switching to fully digital methods increases data privacy for students and makes each step faster and more responsive.

Student Personalization

Personalization means delivering targeted messages to the right students and the right times. Instead of mass communication (that may not be as effective), a personalized approach looks for ways to enhance each student’s experiences and expectations. 

Personalized communication often happens in standard marketing channels like social media, email campaigns and SMS messaging, but it might also change once a student agrees to attend. Personalization is such an important part of application management, that industry leaders are dubbing it "magic" and "the number one trick" for modern institutions.

Education Workflow Automation 

Workflow automation puts several processes on autopilot, without requiring as much human intervention to make things happen throughout the entire process. A basic example would be delivering an automated confirmation message when a prospective student requests information about an academic program via the website.

Another example would be to help students receive automated scholarship and financial aid notifications as part of the overall application management process. This can help streamline communications about financial options and give students more clarity for their next steps.

Spotting New Opportunities for Automation Within Existing Admissions Steps

Even if your admissions toolset is in decent shape, what can you do to improve it?

Automation technology eliminates the manual grunt work so that staff members can focus on what matters most—helping students and parents along the admissions journey.

There are plenty of ways to incorporate automation into how you interact with new and prospective students. It comes down to having an overarching automation strategy and focusing on how each new change benefits students.

1. Initial Inquiries and Prospects

Automated inquiry response is one of the most straightforward ways to incorporate automation into your first interactions with students and candidates. This is because you can quickly build user-friendly intake forms, embed them on existing landing or web pages, and collect data from prospects. 

After students submit information, ensure that it goes seamlessly into your student engagement CRM. Follow-up with an automated confirmation, or deliver the marketing content they requested.

If the inquiry process involves an individual response (like from an admissions counselor or recruitment officer), make sure that workflows are set up to staff members when a student is expecting further follow up. Missing a step here could sacrifice the student’s first opinions and risk losing their enrollment.

2. Manage Application Forms for Prospective Students

Many schools have now migrated to common applications (which students can submit to many schools at once for review within a broad network). This automation is great for students, helping them save time on repetitive information, document sharing, and test score or writing uploads.

Colleges and universities should create automated steps to keep pace in a digital world where new students apply to multiple schools at once, creating a great backlog of applications to process. Admissions decisions and responses should still feel personal, accurate, and attentive to the student’s needs, regardless of the platform where they submit their application.

3. Use Direct Response Decisions

Additionally, many schools have turned to a direct response admission process to further speed up the application status for students. Direct admissions gives students on-the-spot decisions about their admissions offers at particular schools, eliminating many of the “middle man” steps that take place halfway through the process. Plus, direct response options can offer many perks, some to under-represented student groups.

• This type of response often benefits underprivileged student groups.
• Direct response can also reach and convert high-priority students more quickly, eliminating the risk of losing those students to other institutions.
• The direct method reduces the enrollment gap between high school and college, allowing institutions to boost their enrollment numbers more adequately.
• Many students turn to this process to avoid a steep application fee per school.

4. Offer Reminders and Student Connections

Automated reminders and messages are also extremely helpful to eligible students as they navigate a major life change after high school graduation. Use your CRM software or student engagement platform to keep students in-the-know about important events, enrollment requirements, and deadlines. 

The benefit of automating your reminders process is two-fold. First, it helps keep students moving through the admissions funnel without unnecessary delays. Admissions team members also don't have to chase down students for common (and easy) enrollment steps.

5. Simplify the Registration Process

Although the official class registration process comes after a student is admitted, newly enrolled students often require some help and guidance as they make those first general education picks. Email or text automated reminders as class registration gets closer, and automatically share student data with academic advisors or enrollment officers who can better assist with class selection.

The point of automation at this phase is to remove friction points in the new student journey. When a future student feels confused, frustrated, and left behind, these sentiments can shape the way they feel about their campus experience—and even about retention or persistence. 

6. Streamline Student Data Collection

Responsible (and ethical) student data collection happens before, during, and after the admissions cycle. But just because it’s common doesn’t mean that every school has a safe and user-friendly process. 

Secure data-sharing and onboarding processes can help students feel 63% more connected to their chosen universities. As a result, requesting data should always feel simple and stress-free. Admission teams can achieve this by:

• Eliminating repetitive or redundant data-gathering steps (for instance, don’t ask students to enter their names in a form field once you’ve already been communicating with them for months)
• Reassuring students that their personal information will be used responsibly
• Building automated workflows that transfer student information between the right staff members, without skipping or missing important steps

While data collection is the backbone of your online admissions, it shouldn’t feel like a hassle. Incorporating secure automation strategies alleviates frustration while keeping student data protected.

Accelerate Admissions Process Now with Element451

At Element451, we know how to help you connect with students in ways that are engaging, purposeful, and well-connected. That means improving the way that higher education institutions market to learners, help families through the admissions lifecycle, and enroll new students.

Now is the time to make your admissions processes even easier. As the higher education market heats up in terms of competition, help your school stand out from the rest. With user-friendly features, engaging AI tools, and a student-centric approach, Element451 is the admissions CRM you need if you want to grow and scale.

Let’s start reframing your entire admission process—and help thousands of students along the way. 

>> Schedule an Element451 demo today. <<