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Student Lifecycle Management >> CRM Meets the Campus

2/1/2007

By Matt Villano

According to Curtiss Barnes, Oracle's senior director of industry product strategy for education and research, SLM is all about building connections. "There are very few other areas where you have an opportunity to manage a customer, in the sense of a student through very discrete stages of his or her experience with your organization," he says. "What you are doing with this system is creating a dialogue. The more you communicate, the stronger the connections to those students become."

The need for these kinds of connections certainly is imperative. A 2004 report from the college exam organization ACT, What Works in Student Retention, indicated that nearly 25 percent of college freshmen fail to return for their sophomore year, and that only 52 percent of all college students earn degrees within five years of entry. With stronger relationships, Barnes says colleges and universities can play more active roles to help these students, give them the programs that they need, and position them for greater success.

In an ideal world, SLM begins with recruitment. Via an institution's website, the system captures data on prospective students' survey responses, campaign responses, self-service use of the university system, and personal interactions with university staff, and then matches recruiters to potential applicants. Once students enroll, the SLM equation shifts to retention, and revolves around monitoring student progress (academic as well as social) and communicating frequently via e-mail, mail, telephone, and regular in-person counseling sessions, providing social and academic support. The last step in the SLM process is extending the relationship into the alumni years, encouraging lifelong learning, development and, eventually, donations.

"Managed correctly, way down the road, student lifecycle management actually can become a profit center," says Barnes. "Whether you're looking in the near-term or the long-term, this isn't something to be ignored."

Getting to Graduation

The California State University system is a good example of the way colleges and universities can employ SLM to help students matriculate. Comprised of 23 campuses and more than 400,000 students, the Cal State system is the largest university organization in the nation. With this many students enrolled at any given time, it's no wonder the school system had been experiencing difficulty getting students to graduate. Still, Mike McLean, CSU's senior director of common management systems, concedes some of the numbers were downright depressing:

• 24.5 percent of first-time freshmen graduated in four years
• 76 percent of first-time freshmen took six years or more to graduate
• 37 percent of transfer students graduated within two years of transfer
• 63 percent of transfer students took three years or more to graduate following their transfer

In 2005, McLean and the Board of Trustees set out to examine why these trends were occurring. Their findings were alarming. First, they discovered that CSU was not offering classes appropriate for students to meet their prerequisites in a timely fashion. Second, they learned that many students didn't even know what their requirements were. Finally, because most CSU students commute from home, many students were juggling school and family—and school was losing out. "Unbeknownst to us, there were a significant number of roadblocks to timely graduation for many of our students" he says. "We knew there had to be a better way to help them navigate the process in a more timely fashion."

That "better way" revolved around SLM. At the start of 2006, CSU set out to build upon Oracle's PeopleSoft CRM 9.0, in order to provide students with a series of clear, well-supported pathways to graduation. This transformation began with a degree audit process to establish requirements for each major. Next, through the school's intranet, officials communicated via e-mail to inform students about these requirements. Finally, with help from Oracle, the school created its "Common Management System" (CMS) to institutionalize support to more efficiently help students move through school.

According to McLean, this CMS system has created campus "roadmaps" for all degree programs, which include student study plans with term-by-term course outlines. The outlines are designed for students, but are accessible to faculty, advisers, and administrators, as well. Behind the scenes, CMS aligns class schedules to these roadmaps, so students know when their schedules contain conflicts. Through a simple web-based interface, students can chart their progress against requirements. Now such degree audits are mandatory.

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