UC Santa Cruz Admissions
Thanks to the Igneous Group, UC Santa Cruz was able to offer an important service to our undergraduate applicants. The Admissions Web site has allowed students to view their decisions and carry out some of their business on the Web. Since the site went live, we've had a tremendous response from prospective students and our own staff. Routine telephone inquiries have definitely decreased with more and more students using the Web site. Igneous also built an administrator tool for the site, which allows for changes to be made easily with little to no technical expertise. All in all, Igneous did a fantastic job for us.
--Michael McCawley, Associate Director of Admissions, UCSC
Challenge
These days, most college-bound students expect Web access to the schools they're interested in attending. They want to apply, check their application status, and exchange information with prospective schools while online.
While UC provides an online application for all campuses, each individual campus is responsible for administering and maintaining its own admissions system. UCSC Admissions contacted The Igneous Group for a solution that bridged the gap between its outdated, complex Student Information System (SIS) and the need for making secure, personalized information available online to applicants.
Solution
The Igneous Group provided an integrated solution that worked for students, staff, and site administrators.
Students who apply to UCSC can securely log in to check the status of their application, edit basic personal information, and view links targeted to their application status and major.
Admissions staff have an easy-to-use site administration area that gives them control over the content students see when they visit the site.
Staff can easily manage status messages, enrollment and filing dates, lists of majors, and recommended Web links. They can also create associations between these items, which allows for specifically targeted content, depending on a student’s application status and choice of major. For example, a freshmen student starting fall quarter majoring in sociology sees different messages, dates, and links than a transfer student starting winter quarter and majoring in math.
Transparent to both students and staff is the data exchange that occurs once daily between the existing SIS and the Web site. The site seamlessly merges the intricate data in the SIS with data taken in from the Web site. The exchange happens automatically, taking the site down briefly during non-peak hours, but if the need arises, the site administrator can take control and bring the site down manually to perform imports and exports.
Results
The Igneous Group enabled UCSC to become the first campus in the University of California system to give interested students access to their application status over the Internet.
The site transitions smoothly from one academic year to the next because updates to messages, dates, majors, and links are quick and easy to implement. And because students can get the information they need online, phones calls and workloads for staff are drastically reduced enabling better use of staff resources.
