Why Your Non-Traditional Division Needs to Prioritize Its System

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1. Set Your Non-Traditional Division Up For Success
2. Why Look At The System?
3. The Problem With Using Main Campus Systems in CE
4. The Difference a CE-Specific System Can Make
5. It’s All About Prioritization

 

Set Your Non-Traditional Division Up For Success

Non-traditional divisions are increasingly important on the modern college or university campus. As the population of traditional, 18- to 22-year-old learners decreases, and as cuts to institutional budgets become more common, these divisions are bearing more responsibility for the financial health of their institutions.

These divisions are also in a period of exciting potential growth, with significant opportunities to serve increasing numbers of learners. First, employers need their employees to be engaging in continuous learning just to keep pace with changes in their industries, which is growing the corporate training market and driving demand for professional education. Additionally, the middle skill labor market is also growing rapidly, which means increasing numbers of individuals are enrolling in postsecondary education in search of workforce-relevant certificates, certifications and other non-degree programming.

All this combines to open up unique and exciting opportunities for non-traditional divisions to dominate this new era, redefining the role of higher education in the process. However, we’re not seeing colleges and universities stepping up to serve these new audiences as we might have expected. Instead, bootcamps and employer-developed certificate courses are growing, addressing skills gaps that postsecondary institutions have largely ignored.

To stay competitive in the modern era, and to fulfil their responsibility to the institution, non-traditional divisions need to do everything possible to ensure they’re set up to serve the needs of today’s professional and continuing education marketplace. And the best place to start is with the technological system that focuses everything else.

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Prospective students coming to our website aren’t comparing our registration system to other colleges and universities—they’re comparing it to the online shopping experience offered by Amazon and other online vendors.

Mark MrozinskiAssistant Vice President of Workforce Development and Executive Dean, Harper College

Why Look At The System?

Sweat, tears and effort alone aren’t enough to help a division stay competitive in today’s marketplace. Non-traditional divisions need to work smarter.
Today’s non-traditional student is an experienced customer whose expectations are shaped by the quickly evolving e-commerce industry. They expect to be treated like a customer and to receive an intuitive and seamless experience that matches what they get from banks, airlines and every other major business.

Additionally, the administrative experience has more influence on learners than many in higher education might assume. According to DJS Research, 40% of American students said dealing with administration is so complex that it cuts into their study time, and 33% of students said the paperwork and complexity of institutional administration was frustrating. Further, a full third of students told DJS that poor administrative systems negatively affected their view of the university.

This should all be incredibly concerning for non-traditional divisional administrator. After all, lifelong learning is the name of the game and it would be ideal if students continued to return to the same institution for their ongoing education needs. What’s more, from the administrative perspective, it’s significantly cheaper to retain a customer than it is to acquire a new one (with estimates of the cost differences ranging from four to 10 times more expensive).

Finally, from a programmatic perspective, non-traditional divisions are expected to develop and launch offerings that are flexible and responsive to labor market shifts. This responsiveness makes a huge difference when it comes to enrolling students. External demand simply doesn't have the same impact on programming choices for more traditional faculties across the institution.

It’s critical for non-traditional leaders to face the facts: Without a system tailored for the non-traditional space, their divisions will continue to struggle to meet the demands of an increasingly cut-throat industry.

The Problem With Using Main Campus Systems in CE

Many non-traditional divisions either use their main campus system directly, or an offshoot of that system purportedly designed to serve the CE space. But those leaders are still left trying to run a non-traditional division using a traditional system. This is akin to trying to jam the proverbial square peg into the unyielding round hole.

There are three key challenges non-traditional division leaders face trying to use main campus systems to run their businesses:

1. Administrative Headaches
2. Stifled Innovation
3. Poor Student Experience

Administrative Headaches

One of the main reasons many CE leaders decide to use their main campus system—or an offshoot of that system meant to support non-traditional divisions—is because it’s supposed to ease the working relationship between central institutional administration and CE. But it doesn't typically work out that way in practice.

CE divisions often wind up overly reliant on their colleagues on main campus for support in completing the simplest of tasks, from registration and enrollment to gathering metrics.

“One thing that I found frustrating with our old system was having to have go through all these gatekeepers to do what we needed to do,” said Hilary Darling, director of the Summer Institute in Extended Studies at the California Institute of the Arts. “Our main campus colleagues tried really hard to help our office, but the fact of the matter is they had other work that they had to get done before us oftentimes, so we would end up waiting.”

This can leave staff on both sides—from CE and main campus—scrambling, stressed and overworked, and ultimately can negatively impact the student experience.

“One of the crunch times for us is in spring when graduation for the matriculated students occurs. People are scrambling to make sure their transcripts were in order, to make sure they have the credits they needed,” Darling said. “The registrar’s office is busy processing grades for people who are graduating and making sure everyone’s academic progress is in order. That was happening right when I needed my summer students to complete their registration and payment. It became a really problematic registration bottleneck.”

For divisions that are expected to be responsive, customer-centric and innovative, building a CE unit on the back of a system designed for traditional higher education can slow everything down and create significant headaches for CE and main campus staff alike.

Stifled Innovation

Any leader of a non-traditional division whose unit runs on a system—or array of systems—designed for a main campus knows how difficult it is to do something that’s creative, but seemingly simple.

Staff wind up having to repeat work, re-enter information from one system to another, and switch between multiple tools to complete a single task. All this repetition and manual work slows the division down and wastes money. Divisions aren’t able to deploy their human resources in an effective manner when they’re dealing with inefficiencies of this magnitude.

“Barriers to innovation can be technological,” said Sandi Pershing, Assistant Vice President of Engagement at the University of Utah. “You might try to run a class within continuing education that’s outside normal semester timelines so it doesn't work with the traditional campus database. In situations like this, you have to build outside systems to work around the traditional system, which can be cumbersome.”

Ultimately, when CE leaders are operating with the wrong tools, the decision to run a potentially lucrative offering can hinge on whether or not staff have the bandwidth to manage it, and whether the costs of that extra work would minimize the positive impact of the innovative offering.

By running an inefficient back end, CE leaders place significant burdens on their staff—who try to paper over the gaps between their various systems to deliver an experience that looks automated. It becomes an unnecessary barrier to innovation and growth.

 
Poor Student Experience

Amazon has set a high bar. Today’s students expect a seamless, self-directed registration and enrollment experience. They want to manage much of their engagement with the institution and perform basic tasks—like registration, payment and course drops—online and on their own time.

However, most traditional enrollment management systems were not designed with the non-traditional student in mind. Rather, they aimed to replicate the on-campus environment in the digital world, and created a product that mirrored inefficient on-campus processes.

“Unfortunately, most online enrollment registration systems in higher ed grew up around the physical structure of the college or university, and were built with an administrative focus in mind rather than the needs of the student,” said Mark Mrozinski, Assistant Vice President of Workforce Development and Executive Dean at Harper College. “The student navigated the online system just as they would if they walked on campus and you sent them from one office to another to another. There was no continuity of service.”

According to Mrozinski, the digital experience is a major differentiator for today’s students. For non-traditional divisions, relying on an outdated patchwork of systems that delivers a complicated and confusing experience is enough to send prospective students looking for a different education provider.

“Prospective students coming to our website aren’t comparing our registration system to other colleges and universities—they’re comparing it to the online shopping experience offered by Amazon and other online vendors,” he said. “The last thing that we wanted to happen was for a student to navigate to our site, run into a barrier as they try to register, and move to the next company in the Google search.”

The Difference a CE-Specific System Can Make

A system designed for CE delivers a world-class experience for a diverse array of customers. By investing in and evolving a division on the back of one of these highly specialized systems, non-traditional division leaders can ensure main campus receives the critical information it needs while keeping the division flexible and responsive to market shifts.

Specifically, this is where Lifelong Learning—the Student Lifecycle Management (SLM) platform by Modern Campus—makes a massive difference for colleges and universities across North America. Crafted specifically for non-traditional education, Lifelong Learning provides staff with the tools they need to efficiently manage all aspects of the learner lifecycle, including marketing, enrollment, curriculum, finance and more. The SLM software platform integrates with main-campus systems, engages students with an Amazon-like experience, optimizes staff efficiency, and provides business intelligence that empowers data-driven decision making.

Leveraging the Lifelong Learning SLM helps non-traditional divisions break past the limitations of traditional management systems in four key ways:

1. Modernizing the Student Experience
2. Realizing Back-End Efficiencies
3. Improving the Relationship Between CE and Main Campus
4. Creating Opportunities for Operational Consolidation

Modernizing the Student Experience

Non-traditional learners are generally not enrolling for a long-term degree program. Their barriers to exit from an institution are low and they will vote with their feet with a bad experience. It’s critical for non-traditional divisions to deliver a great experience to ensure they keep coming back.

For Lifelong Learning, it starts with allowing postsecondary institutions to offer learners a streamlined shopping experience that is built on best practices of the e-commerce industry. Offering features specifically designed to turn prospects into conversions—from the digital shopping cart to online credit card payment processing—non-traditional divisions can leverage the SLM to deliver their students a simple and secure Amazon-like registration experience.

Taking another page out of the book of e-commerce leaders, Lifelong Learning also offers abandoned shopping cart retrieval. This means if a student adds items to the cart, but then fails to complete the purchase, the SLM saves their cart information—including pricing, discounts and any other customized information—and automatically prompts the student via email to return to their cart to complete the purchase. Over one year of internal study, this feature led 8% of learners to recover their otherwise abandoned carts, leading to an average increase in revenues of 17% for institutions using the Lifelong Learning SLM.

Once enrolled, the innovative Student Portal allows institutions to maintain their positive relationships with learners. The Student Portal is a self-service portal that allows learners to engage with their institution on their own terms. They can enroll in courses, request transcripts, review their historical financial information and much, much more all through their personal portal. They can also start and save applications (to submit when they’re ready), drop courses and track their progress toward certificates.

Importantly, given the nature of non-traditional students—who enroll part-time, stop out, take classes when able, and enroll for professional development when needed—the Student Portal ensures students’ engagement with the institution is intuitive and simplified. This makes it easy for learners to keep coming back without unnecessary roadblocks.

“In any one year, our retention rate is about 40 percent from year to year. That’s a lot of turnover in students, and it’s part of a short-term training paradigm,” Mrozinski, formerly from Harper College, said. “What that means for our work with Lifelong Learning is that new students are constantly acquainting themselves with our online experience. It’s very different from a four-year university, where they have a steep learning curve in the first semester, but then they know how the system works. Our students are constantly learning the system, so we need to offer them something intuitive, which they can easily navigate and which puts up few barriers.”

This level of self-service mirrors the kind of experience customers are used to receiving in their interactions with other major retailers—from banks and airlines to movie theatres and even grocery stores. By delivering a modern student experience, harnessed by best practices from the e-commerce industry, Lifelong Learning helps institutions get students enrolled and retain them over the long term.

“With the Student Portal, we significantly improved our student experience and that has made a difference for re-enrollment,” said Robin Sease, a business analyst at UC Berkeley Extension.

Realizing Back-End Efficiencies

By bringing in a system specifically designed to support the operation of a non-traditional division, staff are  spend less time on mundane, automatable tasks.

To start, Lifelong Learning isn’t tied to the semester system. Divisions can launch courses or programs at any time. This means decisions about whether or not to launch an offering can be based on factors like market demand and potential revenue, rather than whether staff have the bandwidth to MacGyver an ineffective system.

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In our first full year with the system, which was last year, our revenue was $9.6 million. This year, we’re on target for over 30% growth and fully anticipate $12 million in revenue.

Nicole WestrickFormer Associate Vice Provost, Temple University

What’s more, by implementing operational best practices and automating a number of back-end workflows, Lifelong Learning allows non-traditional divisions to adopt a high-tech/high-touch approach to management where staff time is devoted to high-value work. For example, looking back at launching an offering, Lifelong Learning automates the approval workflow process, notifying the right people at the right time when their input is required. This means non-traditional divisions overcome the common process roadblock of approvals simply getting lost in the shuffle and allow them to stay responsive to labor market shifts.

For non-traditional divisions, freeing up staff time is absolutely critical to keeping their unit on the cutting edge and focused on delivering great student experiences—which can have a massive impact on the bottom line.

“In our first full year with the system, which was last year, our revenue was $9.6 million. This year, we’re on target for over 30% growth and fully anticipate $12 million in revenue,” said Nicole Westrick, Former Associate Vice Provost of Temple University. “It makes sense because we’re helping people shift their focus from administrative work to the things that really matter: program development, marketing and curriculum.”

Improving the Relationship Between CE and Main Campus

Many CE leaders believe they can strengthen their relationship with main campus by using the main campus system. Instead, the traditional system doesn't fit the CE division’s non-traditional needs and the relationship with main campus gets strained.

Often, non-traditional divisions are reliant on main campus systems for everything they need to run their division, from data to enrollment services. This reliance can put a significant burden on both CE and main campus staff. Additionally, data is often provided when possible—rather than when needed—and typically needs to be entirely cleaned and reformatted to be useful for CE leaders.

By leveraging Lifelong Learning, leaders have ownership over all critical elements of their business and ensure their staff have the capacity to move the organization in the direction it needs to go. The SLM has out-of-the-box integrators that connect into main campus financial, SIS and ERP systems, ensuring central administration has access the information it needs.

This robust focus on integration does more than improve accountability and data-sharing between main campus and non-traditional divisions; it improves data integrity and security as well.

“If Lifelong Learning didn’t integrate with Banner, it would have effectively created a two-step process where student registration and financial information would not automatically migrate into Banner. It would have to be downloaded and then uploaded,” said Bob Peterson, Former President and CEO of Cuyahoga Community College’s (Tri-C) Corporate College. “With that, you always have the possibility for errors. It’s not as an efficient a process.”

Lifelong Learning has driven significant and quick returns for Tri-C. Within six months of adopting the Lifelong Learning SLM, Tri-C grew it’s overall enrollment by 16%. Additionally, the percentage of students enrolling online registrations grew by 52%.

Creating Opportunities for Operational Consolidation

Over decades of operations, colleges and universities tend to evolve into sprawling organizations with numerous courses, programs and technologies running parallel to one another. For non-traditional divisions—who are typically responsible for generating revenue—this poses some clear and significant challenges. Divisions become set in their ways and often siloed.

First, with so many divisions all running non-credit offerings independent of one another, it can create a confusing and inconsistent experience for students.

“The student experience has been quite varied, depending on where in the college students enrolled and what they were trying to do,” said Geoff Wilmshurst, Former Vice President of Partnerships at Camosun College. “It could be enhanced by offering a consistent enrollment experience.”

Streamlining the operation of non-traditional offerings into a single system not only simplifies and improves the experience of learners, it minimizes the chances of offering duplication and allows divisions to focus more on their areas of subject matter expertise rather than on the minutiae of program management. All of which leads to a net positive for the divisions themselves and for the institution as a whole.

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With Lifelong Learning, it is a huge benefit to us to find one single system that lifts the administrative burden off our staff and allows our customers to own their learning experience.

Kristy DavisSenior Business Analyst of IT Virtual Teams, University of Minnesota (UMN)

“Due to word of mouth and relative ease of use, more units have adopted the Lifelong Learning system,” said Kristy Davis, Senior Business Analyst of IT Virtual Teams at the University of Minnesota (UMN). “This in turn makes more offerings available to learners all in one place, thus prompting more enrollments in offerings across the entire UMN system.”

Lifelong Learning SLM allows colleges and universities to dismantle the complex spiderweb of shadow systems that tend to characterize non-traditional divisions. At UMN, this led to one division saving $15,000 annually, and another division saving $33,000 annually.

“We had a number of homegrown or purchased solutions from a variety of vendors, and that created multiple redundant systems,” Davis said. “With Lifelong Learning, it is a huge benefit to us to find one single system that lifts the administrative burden off our staff and allows our customers to own their learning experience.”

UMN is not alone in experiencing the benefits of operational consolidation. UC Berkley Extension experienced similar effectiveness improvements upon implementing the Lifelong Learning SLM.

“We were able to decommission at least a hundred different applications, shadow systems and processes as Extension moved fully onto Lifelong Learning,” said UC Berkeley Extension’s Sease.

Bringing in a system tailor-made to manage non-traditional programming can be an effective way to shake off the cobwebs, grow revenues institution-wide and improve operational effectiveness across the board.

It’s All About Prioritization

For non-traditional divisions operating in the 21st century, the capacity to work smart is critical to following through on the mission. After all, these divisions are charged with achieving two goals that are seemingly at odds with each other: expand access to the institution to often underserved demographics; and generate enough revenue to help reduce reliance on tuition, fees and grants.

However, these divisions have done admirable work on achieving these sometimes opposed goals by thinking creatively, acting entrepreneurially and focusing on delivering a great student experience. Continuing to do so now, in a more competitive marketplace, requires more than gumption and sweat-equity. It requires divisional leaders to prioritize the adoption of a system designed specifically to help them grow their business.

“It’s all about allocating resources to the things that matter: You can afford to do whatever you want, so long as you make it a priority,” said Mrozinski, formerly from Harper College. “Nothing will grow unless you resource it. We chose to prioritize Lifelong Learning over other initiatives because we felt that the time was right to position ourselves for growth over the next decade.”