The 4 DOGE-focused Initiatives your Institution should kick off today

With today's focus on compliance and government efficiency, we expect there to be a high level of scrutiny on financial aid processes and personnel costs at public higher education institutions.  As such, we have identified 4 efficiency initiatives that institutions can kick-off to be ready.

1.  Improve compliance for a student’s citizenship, residency, and financial aid status

Compliance is a significant focus by the current administration -- especially as it relates to the immigration status of students, financial aid being paid, and residency.  As such, institutions will be tasked with proving that they are complying with the policies related to each of these areas.

1. What qualifications does the student have as it relates to these policies?
2. What is required to prove compliance with those policies?
3. How well can you verify both the qualification and supporting documentation?
4. How is the institution complying?  Is it efficiently using technology such as AI to ensure efficiency in the process?

In many organizations, the processes are manual for identifying the qualifications required, gathering the supporting information, and verifying it.  Using automation and artificial intelligence to streamline the process and prove compliance can have a significant impact on how seriously the institution is taking the policies as well as reducing waste.

2.  Improve the quality of data in the student information system

The student information system is arguably the most important system at an institution.  It is the system of record for everything about the student, his status at the institution, his academic history, and where he is in his academic career.  When transcripts are generated, they are generated directly from this system.

As such, if the quality of the information in the system about the student is inaccurate; it creates a series of problems for the institution:

• It makes it difficult or impossible to prove the institution is complying with regulations
• It can impact whether an employer or other university can trust the information provided about the student (including transcripts)
• It can drive a significant amount of effort to correct data quality issues at a later point in time

In many organizations, much of this is handled manually as part of the admissions process (since this is where much of the data is captured about the student).  A data quality efficiency initiative can be successful by ensuring the following:

1. The information is easy to capture
2. Rules that understand who the person is and his relationship with the institution are applied to ensure that the right information is captured based on governing policies
3. The information can be validated against other systems of record
4. AI techniques can be used to identify data quality issues

3.  Reduce costs related to fraudulent enrollments

Fraud in higher education can create a significant amount of waste -- which could represent as much as 5% of an institution's operating costs.  We went into a bit of detail as to the techniques and impacts of fraud in the following article.  To summarize, there are 3 ways in which bad actors conduct fraudulent activities to add to the institution's cost:

• They use a stolen identity to steal money from the institution
• They gain access and utilize resources from the institution that they shouldn't
• They use the institution to launder an identity for defrauding others

The gateway to all of these activities is the process by which a student applies to the institution.  Implementing techniques to catch / prevent fraudulent activity using AI can significantly decrease the risk while minimizing the impact to both applicants and admissions processes.

4.  Reduce the effort to onboard new students

Institutions spend a significant amount of time and effort attracting and onboarding new students.  This is because the onboarding process requires a significant amount of information to be gathered and verified.  Institutions can reduce the onboarding effort by 60%-80% by streamlining each of the key parts of the process:

1. Make it easy for the student to provide all the information needed by the institution at once, reducing the need to repeatedly contact the student for supplemental information.
2. Make sure that the information gathered from the student is relevant and accurate, eliminating the need to contact the student to correct inaccurate information.
3. Make sure that the process is simple and easy to understand from the student's perspective so that there is less time needed by staff to answer questions and correct errors.
4. Make sure that staff needs to spend less time processing new students through automation and artificial intelligence.

Where Mutara fits in

Our solutions use each of these techniques to ensure that accurate information is captured and verified in a way that uses automation and artificial intelligence to minimize the amount of effort required by staff.