Admissions in Action: How to Build a Better Class on a Budget

Admissions professionals constantly hear that they need to “do more with less.”

But how do you increase enrollment and add new programs with a decreased or stagnant budget, limited staffing and an inefficient, decentralized admissions process?

As you’ll learn from Liaison’s on-demand webinar, How to Build a Better Class on a Budget, it’s a lot easier than you might think.

Lessons learned, lessons shared

The webinar features a panel discussion with admissions leaders from two universities explaining how they used Liaison’s tools, including its Centralized Application Service (CAS^TM), to build incoming classes more efficiently and less expensively.

University of the Pacific, for example, has been using numerous CASs in multiple programs for more than 20 years.

“We have launched several new programs in just a few years, but we weren’t given additional staffing resources,” says Olivia Nash, assistant dean for enrollment and student services at University of the Pacific. “Of course, it’s very difficult to manage multiple workflows and multiple systems. By going to an all-CAS model, we now have just one review tool. That saved us a lot of time and, honestly, a lot of overtime. It also cut down on our troubleshooting costs.”

More students, more applications

St. Cloud State University, on the other hand, is a relative newcomer to the world of Liaison’s CAS. It recently joined GradCAS^TM, a single application portal that gives admissions offices an improved way to recruit, admit and enroll best-fit graduate students while saving money and headcount each admissions cycle.

“We’ve already seen a significant increase in applications in a very short period of time,” says Sean Pitzer, associate director of graduate admission at St. Cloud State. “In addition, some of our programs noticed very quickly that they began receiving a lot of applicants from students who were not already on their radar. Some of the students who found us would not have known about our programs before we joined GradCAS^TM.”

Other topics addressed in the webinar include:

• The ease of the CAS implementation experience.
• The benefits their institutions enjoyed by becoming members of a CAS community.
• How they achieved faculty buy in and engagement.

Watch “How to Build a Better Class on a Budget” here. It’s free and there’s no obligation, so what are you waiting for?