How Hawkeye Community College is Enhancing Student Access

About Hawkeye Community College  

 

 

The Challenge   

Every day, students encounter obstacles that seem to pop up out of nowhere. Balancing work, family life and school are not easy tasks. Considering the number of challenges they already face; their educational journey shouldn't involve unnecessary hoops to jump through.  

It's important to make their path to success as smooth as possible. 

For Hawkeye Community College, it was critical to provide foundational access to their learners. Particularly for workforce students, who often face more obstacles than what is considered the typical college student.    

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Non-traditional students oftentimes struggle. They have more barriers than traditional students.

Srdjan Golub | Senior Director of Business and Community Education

Basic access for students starts with a colleague ID. With this, they’re able to connect to their email and library resources. But for students who fall outside the traditional academic calendar, there are often barriers that prevent access to these services easily.  

They needed a seamless process to create the ultimate student experience.  

The Solution

Providing students with comprehensive access to resources and services is paramount—especially during a time of choice. 

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It’s very important to have an efficient way to give access to those services.

Srdjan Golub

For Hawkeye, once a student comes through the door—credit or non-credit—you’re a student at the school. There’s no differentiation and the student experience should reflect that. 

By adopting Modern Campus Lifelong Learning’s Ellucian Colleague Connector, Hawkeye is able to efficiently provide services to their learners.  

For Golub, something as simple as a student ID has been able to open the possibilities on and off-campus for every learner of the institution.  

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It was all manual work before, and we had to go through all these steps. Now it’s become seamless to do it through our automated system.

Srdjan Golub

Through the Colleague connector, students' records are passed to active directory where they are issued their credentials that open up all campus services.  

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To give that modern experience to the students they have to be able to self-register and see what's available.

Srdjan Golub

What's Ahead

Golub’s goal is to have the financial reconciliation that they have always done by hand, to be done via integration.  

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With the Colleague Connector, we’ll have all the data points they would need to verify our revenue and expenses

Srdjan Golub

The data that the Hawkeye team has access to has also given Golub the validation needed for more staffing, especially when it comes to having a data specialist that can keep everything streamlined.  

The automation process has also given staff the ability to focus on more complex tasks. 

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You're in control of what you can do, which in turn frees up our staff to do other things. They can cross-sell other services, focus on customer-oriented tasks and our programmers can focus on creating new programs.

Srdjan Golub

Staff are freed up from routine tasks to focus on impactful programs. Things like education and career services programs for individuals with criminal records, support of short-term training for in-demand occupations and career training for those with employment barriers get the attention they deserve.

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It allowed us to grow and provide a modern experience for our students

Srdjan Golub

It all comes down to putting the student at the center and providing that sense of belonging.  

“All these connections will be better connected through Colleague and we're hoping that a student simply feels like a part of Hawkeye at any part of their educational journey” Golub said.  

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