Worldwide, nearly 300 million students are enrolled in the higher education system. Colleges and universities do more than deliver a stand-alone product to these millions of customers. They are often responsible for a veritable Maslow pyramid for each student, including housing, food, health programs, public safety, and overall quality of life.
Without the right systems in place, the billions of data points and internal processes that underpin those systems can quickly spiral out of control. So how do top-performing higher education institutions manage the student lifecycle? With workflow automation : a magic wand to get the job done with ease and efficiency .
How Colleges and Universities Are Improving Efficiency Through Workflow Automation
A recent study found that a quarter of faculty members waste four or more hours a day struggling with tasks like manual data entry. With the right automated systems in place, education teams can reduce the hours spent on paperwork and better spend that time with students themselves. In fact, Ernst & Young found that in one case, automation saved a university 1,330 hours of manual work per year by reducing 40 productivity-draining tasks to just one . Workflow automation software is a lifesaver for colleges and universities struggling to streamline their processes. Here are ten ways they’re using it.
Monitoring student performance
Why spend the same administrative time evaluating a freight forwarders brokers email lists student with a 4.0 GPA and perfect attendance as you would a student whose GPA is gradually dropping? About 1,400 colleges and universities in the United States use workflow automation to track student behavior and predict which students will need more attention.
Programs can sift through reams of data and identify outliers who are at risk of dropping out of college. Systems can automatically flag students with falling GPAs or those who tend to pay tuition late. Others go further and identify nuanced trends, such as students who have rolling classes on Thursdays and are more likely to abandon ship.
Attendance tracking
Academic success coaches can use attendance tracking to identify students at risk of dropping out and take preventative measures to get things back on track. In one presentation, a faculty member at Georgia State estimated that he would find a handful of students at risk of dropping out over the next year. Using machine intelligence, they found 800 .
Proactive alerts automatically notify staff of repeated tardiness or absences, helping to encourage retention and graduation for these at-risk students. You don’t have to wait to compile a report—by then, students will have missed even more class time. With real-time visibility into student activity, you can send automatic reminders to absent students while class is still in session.