How many students enroll at your school, college or academy, per academic year? Do you re-register students at the beginning of each term? And, how exactly do you deal with the whole enrollment process? Do you use enrollment management software?
If you’ve been looking for new ways to make this process more efficient, we’ve got you covered. We’ll help you find out exactly how an enrollment management software, such as DreamClass, makes this fundamental administrative process of your school more efficient. And, how it helps you leave behind any complications, delays or other problems you’ve been probably dealing with, to date.
The enrollment process
The enrollment process, be it for a small volume of students or a larger one, definitely requires some labor. Extra labor, when completed without a well-organized process. Especially, when it’s not augmented by the respective software system.
And it’s not only about the extra work or time you probably need to invest, just to register your students to the current academic year or term. More than that, it’s the frustration and the disappointment parents and students may experience, because of it. And that’s, mostly because of the delays and mistakes that probably happen, in the absence of the respective software system. Consequently, leaving you with a feeling of regret and puzzling over how this could have been prevented; how you could make this part of academic management more efficient.
The good news is, that you can stay away from all these difficulties.
Before we show you how, let us first we present you with a summary of the things that can go wrong during an enrollment period. We’ll be focusing mostly on setbacks, mistakes and difficulties in managing the whole process. No doubt, you can probably think of additional difficulties you have to deal with, from time to time. But, let’s go through the most popular ones; and then we can get into the ways enrollment management software can help you bypass them.
Enrolling your students without the respective software system — things that can go wrong
To understand which improvements are more crucial, let’s examine the enrollment process both from the parent’s and the student’s perspective. And, of course, from your perspective, as you’re probably part of the administrative personnel or the educational organization’s faculty. That would mean, of course, that school information management is important to you.
So, here are some common mistakes and other difficulties or problems you might have to deal with:
Unexpected delays
No matter how well-prepared your personnel is to inform parents and students regarding upcoming enrollment dates, there will be some parents, guardians or students that will miss these deadlines; no need to explain the reasons why this may happen. But, more importantly, some of them may even request an extension of the final deadline, with whatever side-effects this would bring to the processes that follow.
A deviation like that begets issues, such as what will your classes be? What about assigning teachers? When you’re not aware of how many students will finally attend each class, you cannot answer these questions. And, in case you’re running a private school or academy, chances are you’ll probably give in and accept new students later than expected.
Errors in hand-written enrollment forms that lead to incorrect student records
When parents or students complete enrollment forms it is highly likely that there will be a few mistakes here and there. And the thing is, most of the time, such typos and other mistakes on enrollment applications usually go unnoticed and cause further problems, down the line. Take for example an error in contact details that might go unnoticed. If so, how will you inform a parent or guardian of a student’s absence, if needed in the future? Even if discovered early on, they will probably need some extra handovers before they’re corrected.
Such mistakes, including duplicate registrations, incomplete data and many other, may probably occur when you are tasked with the collection of enrollment forms without further inspection. Which, might possibly happen when you need to massively collect and archive student applications. But, truth be told, it may even happen if you conduct a thorough review of the application forms. Human or clerical error, that’s how it is.
Re-registering students or repeating the same work each season
Repeating the registration procedure for existing students is possibly something you might not see as a problem. But, that the truth is, with enrollment management software, it could be omitted, entirely. Performing the whole registration process from the top, for students that have already attended your school during — at least — the previous year, is redundant labor. Even if you’re only copying existing data entries to your new school period.
Repeating the enrollment process within the academic year
By that same token, depending on the nature or type of your school, you may need to re-register your students, for every term. Especially if the next term to follow needs a completely different structure. For example, if there is a set of courses that students are free to choose from, you’d be in over your head with this sort of bureaucracy.
This goes for any other educational scenario that deviates from the typical academic year of a public school, as well. In that case, you’re kind of obligated to repeat such tasks, in order to register students to classes, courses or departments, based on your school curriculum, all over again.
How do these sound?
Well, that definitely sounds tedious, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t it be much better if you could make the whole enrollment process easier? Improving communication with parents and students, and minimizing handovers pertinent to enrollment applications under review. These are only some of the benefits enrollment management software has to offer. Let’s see exactly how it works.
How Enrollment Management Software upgrades admission and enrollment
With enrollment management software, such as DreamClass, you can let errors be a thing of the past. The same goes for, unnecessary complexity and other hurdles that probably slow down your process. Here’s how:
Send notifications on enrollment dates early on using DreamClass
The moment you decide on the admission dates, you can send out an email to parents, guardians and/or independent students, to inform them of when your school or academy will be available to receive students. That is, provided you already have them registered on your system.
In essence, this is feasible for last year’s students or students that attended your school in the past. That way, you may run the whole enrollment process almost effortlessly. Informing and enrolling past students with DreamClass, takes only a few minutes. Keep in mind, these emails can be sent massively, to different groups of students or to different classes. Or, based on any other classification you prefer, really.
Eliminate mistakes
Since you’ll have all of your students’ data stored within DreamClass, chances are that mistakes during registration will be limited; eliminated, even. Once you receive your students’ enrollment applications, you can easily enter all the required information to the system. And that allows for autocomplete functions and suggestions based on past entries; thus, minimizing duplicates and other registration-related mistakes. Apart from that, it’s so much easier for you to communicate and validate this data.
Facilitate the selection process
In case you run a private school or an academy that accepts students based on a specific enrollment policy, there’s no doubt that you definitely need enrollment management software, such as DreamClass. Having all of your enrollment applications already stored in your system, it will be significantly easier for you or your registrar to filter out students, based on the decision criteria you’ve already set. Also, once you’ve finalized this internal process you can then inform parents or students on whether they’ve been accepted or not; just by sending them an email. And, what’s easier than that?
Easily share existing(or past) student data
No need to describe the process to any of your colleagues. You need only copy or update existing information. And then have your students enroll for the new semester or academic year, upon request.
Enrollment to classes, courses or departments, a mere few clicks away
Same as above; once you have student data stored on your system, you can easily assign them to classes and courses. In the same way, assigning teachers to classes will also be a breeze.
Start your academic year or term the right way
The enrollment process is only the beginning of your students’ educational journey. And, DreamClass comes with a plethora of features that will help you make your school, your academy or any educational organization, really, stand out from the noise. And you can even do it from home!
What do you say? Would you like to make the enrollment process of this academic year or term, as simple as it can be? Go with one of our subscription plans and choose the one that best fits your school’s needs.
