Declining enrollment is encouraging colleges and universities to explore other routes than tapping into the traditional pool of high-school grads. Where are they looking? At the 36 million college goers who didn’t quite make it to a degree. “Stopouts,” or students that abandoned their higher-ed journey, represent a fount of enrollment potential. But attracting this particular group back to school is not without its challenges. Here’s how institutions are welcoming returning learners back on campus.
Demystify the re-enrollment process
One of the most obvious yet ignored ways your institution can boost re-enrollment: just make it look easy to do. Another task on the agenda is migraine-inducing, especially when you have no idea what you’re getting yourself into. The Atlantic calls this administrative frustration the “time tax.” And higher-ed institutions are frequent leviers. As humans, we’ve become so accustomed to seemingly simple processes snagging up our days and unleashing a long-term nightmare of phone calls and red tape. So when we come across a potential time-drain, we go the easy route: we do nothing at all. This is something top-performing colleges and universities are using automation to actively combat.
How digital process automation boosts efficiency in higher ed
The best way to decrease the “time tax” hidden in your re-enrollment process is to finesse your back-office processes. Slow, mismanaged tasks add to the mental gymnastics stopouts need to perform in order to re-enroll. Automation for higher ed can lower the time investment barrier by making things quicker to do. Researchers with Ernst & Young discovered that can from 40 down to 1. This time-savings trickles down to students, creating a more user-friendly experience for potential re-enrollees. You’ll find automation driving campus-wide processes like:
