In the last few decades, higher ed institutions figured that there was no shortage of prospectus students, and they could keep their classes full even if a few students dropped out. However, times have changed, and colleges are slowly recognizing the consequences of poor management, retention, and graduation rates. Now, there’s great emphasis on understanding the student lifecycle and enhancing it to ensure students successfully enroll and graduate.

From an IT perspective, we believe that problem lies in the complex software ecosystem colleges use to manage their data. Due to this system’s inefficiencies, they can’t synchronize, exchange, deduplicate, and authenticate student data related to marketing, recruiting, enrollment, etc.

In this post, we’ll share the breakdown of the student life cycle and how IT departments can use an integration platform to enhance performance.

Enhancing the Student Life Cycle Process in Higher Ed Institutions

1. Marketing

Due to the smartphone revolution and COVID-19 social norms, colleges are switching from traditional marketing practices by digitalizing their branding. By understanding and segmenting your target audience, you can ensure you get the right students enrolling in your college. For this, you need healthy data.

With iPaaS platforms rapidly becoming obsolete, college IT departments are now switching to an integration platform like ASMA Connect to cleanse their data for accurate processing and improve personalized communication across multiple platforms in real-time.

2. Recruiting

The next process in the student life cycle is recruiting, which involves working with several departments, such as marketing, accounts, coordination, and faculties to attract and assist students. This task isn’t easy; however, your IT department can make it much easier by eliminating inconsistent data, so you only have accurate, real-time insights to work with.

3. Enrollment/Admissions

With new communication trends, colleges have no choice but to adapt, and finding new effective and creative ways to exchange information with students often falls to the IT department. Using an integration platform, anyone can share real-time updates without learning to code or handle complicated systems.  To make this process easier, the platform automatically updates phone numbers and emails so you have accurate information.

4. Student Success and Retention

The problem with traditional systems is that they don’t provide a 360-degree view of data flowing across campus departments to improve retention and graduation rates. Even if the systems provide tons of data, it’s often too complex for them to handle. Hence, higher ed institutions need simplified data to deal with issues, like falling student grades, disciplinary issues, poor attendance, etc. With this information, they provide relevant feedback to ensure student success and retention.

5. Advancement

Healthy data exchange across every department can smoothly bring you to the advancement stage, which includes processes like alumni engagement, fundraising, and other community activities. Successful advancement can help you effectively increase awareness, provide opportunities, and create long-term relationships with people, including students and staff. With an integration platform, IT departments can get actionable information which they use in their messages, marketing, communications, and policy work.

Bottom Line

Due to multiple processes in the student lifecycle, higher ed institutions have had to manage a complex software ecosystem with broken information strings. With ASMA Connect, you can align all these processes into one super process and streamline all activities using a single platform.