Would you spend four years of your life at a college which repeatedly lost your paper application or failed to update its students’ transcripts in a timely manner? Or would you choose one which had its application forms and student records processed and accessible online?
While most document-driven industries have jumped on board with document scanning to reduce costs and increase efficiency, a number of educational institutions are lagging pitifully behind, using old-fashioned paper applications, and apparently it is harming their student admissions.
A recent Capita survey, cited in an Intelligence Daily guest column by Mark Harvey, sales manager of Capita’s U.K. Division, shows that 55% of colleges have not modernized their application processes. Harvey warns that if colleges want to attract a higher calibre of student, they must consider the student’s experience. Digitizing the application system speeds up the college acceptance process and also improves transparency between the institution, its faculty and and its students. In this digital age, young people are trained to use technology and online storage systems to manage everything from photos to music to school work. It is essential for universities be up-to-date in these technologies in order to win over the confidence and trust of their incoming freshmen.
Since federal funding for higher education has been on the decline and many academic departments are being consolidated or cut, the financial and practical benefits of scanning all paper records and investing in an online document storage are manyfold. Going paperless generates significant savings on storage, labor and printing supplies, and it also allows the university to reduce its margin of error, improve performance and efficiency dramatically. So much so that, according to Harvey, the only way educational institutions will survive in this shaky economic reality is by switching electronic documents. By streamlining the application system and by eliminating sluggish and outdated document processes, college administrators are able to better assess where to make changes and cut costs.
The process is simple. A one-time document scanning service imports all applications, forms and records into digital format while OCR conversion makes them editable online, and voila! digital applications!