Western Governors University (WGU), a private, nonprofit online university based in Salt Lake City, UT, faced a dilemma in its admissions office: a slow, inefficient enrollment process. WGU needed a solution to help it remain competitive.
The Client
Remember when you were a high school student applying for college? Waiting to hear if a school had received your admissions application was painful. And waiting for that coveted acceptance letter was even worse! To the frustration of many applicants and admission staff members alike, Western Governors University (WGU)’s admission enrollment process suffered from lengthy delays. To make matters even worse, university counselors had poor visibility, so they had to make critical enrollment decisions with limited information.
Applying to More Than One School
It’s common for prospective students to apply to several competing universities. So, it comes as no surprise that shorter, more streamlined enrollment processes factor into a candidate’s school choice. This reality puts major pressure on universities to strive to remain competitive, or risk losing promising potential students.
Unfortunately, WGU’s transcript evaluation process was tedious and required staff to manually enter course and credit information for each class from every university transcript. This exhaustive approach bottlenecked admissions and forced university counselors to make recommendations with a limited amount of transcript information. A change was needed to keep WGU competitive- and fast!
Effective Solution
WGU soon began its search for the right solution to meet all its needs. It decided to partner up with the folks at Naviant, who had extensive experience with identifying, optimizing, and implementing solutions to help organizations facing problems like theirs. Naviant started at the beginning. They carefully analyzed WGU’s document management process from top to bottom. Naviant ultimately determined that an OnBase solution by Hyland would effectively transform WGU’s document management process and eliminate its pain points that were slowing it down.
The OnBase solution Naviant designed employed an OCR process to capture and automatically read and transfer transcript data. This single update allowed WGU counselors to have clear visibility into a comprehensive academic history of each prospective student at their fingertips. Now counselors were able to make more accurate program recommendations and help students by offering them customized plans.
A Lasting Impact
The affordances of OnBase went beyond simply accelerating WGU’s enrollment process for the prospective student’s convenience. It allowed WGU to offer its prospective students a more tailored experience that could directly impact the student’s academic and career path. WGU could truly show its prospective students that it cared about their individual success.
The integration solution was so effective, it freed up more than an hour a day for each transcript processor. This efficiency created a team-wide savings of 125 hours per week and allowed staff to attend to other important tasks, which enhanced overall productivity.
Now prospective students don’t skim past WGU simply because they heard from competitors sooner. Instead, they receive a personalized, in-depth evaluation report and degree plan. This plan creates a clear roadmap for their success at WGU and lets them know they are valued and supported even before they make an admissions decision.
"We would have needed a legion of human data processors to achieve what Naviant’s solution did, and continues to do, for us. The time savings we enjoy now are invaluable. It’s why I keep asking Naviant to do more magic for me."
- Darin Hobbs, University Registrar, Western Governors University
