2019 SCHRUG Alliance Conference Recap

SCHRUG 2019 is a wrap.  It was great meeting with old friends and new at the Davidson-Gundy Alumni center.  We also unveiled an early version of our Admissions product. 

 In keeping with my 2019 Alliance Conference blog entry, here are a few observations and key learnings from participants: 

Online Application Software 

Several organizations were looking for a better way of capturing candidate applications.  Although many organizations utilize some sort of common application (Apply Texas, Common App, Coalition App), they often have a multitude of systems across all the types of applicants.  

In fact, a number of organizations are utilizing some form of PeopleSoft / PeopleTools / AAWS online application – with many at different levels of fluid adoption. 

Duplicate Applications are a Significant Challenge 

Many institutions have significant challenges dealing with duplicate applications.  The duplicates are generally created by inattention to detail, candidates and parents each creating applications, and test scores being reported. 

 Although PeopleSoft has a mechanism for finding duplicates, data privacy initiatives put in place by the standardized testing organizations has made it more difficult to find duplicates that are coming from those feeds.  We will be writing a blog entry providing more detail on how to address these challenges soon.  

Use of CRM 

Although some organizations are utilizing CRM for engaging with certain groups of candidates (such as Graduate applicants), its use is not widespread yet.  However, incorporating a CRM is something on the radar of most – who are either considering or in the process of rolling out. 

 Document Management 

Finally, many organizations discussed how they were utilizing document management solutions to help manage all of the documents that need to be associated with an application.  One of the biggest areas of challenge is transcripts, which are often provided in paper form.  Unfortunately, the OCR technology in the tools available doesn’t do a sufficient job of turning those transcripts into a machine readable format, which introduces significant manual effort in the process. 

Miss our Demo? 

We were pleased with the reception of our session, "Optimizing Your Admissions Processes- bringing together data, systems, and teams for better results." Quite a few people shared their interest in attending our session, but sadly were unable to attend. We gave a sneak peak of our very first product demo. If you missed it, never fear, we’ll be repeating this in a webinar on September 11 at 1:00pm CST.

Register here: https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_sjdYPuE-RAmJ5fo0lPNFpA