University of Southern California Selects Liaison’s UniCAS

Enterprise enrollment management solution delivers modern applicant experience and allows schools, departments and programs at USC to centralize data for advanced strategic planning.

WATERTOWN, Mass. (March 15, 2016) – Liaison, the leader in admissions management and enrollment marketing solutions for higher education, today announced that the University of Southern California (USC), one of the world’s top private research universities, will implement Liaison’s UniCAS™ solution to centralize its graduate application process. After an extensive evaluation process, the university selected Liaison’s platform to manage more than 50,000 graduate applications per year across more than 400 USC graduate programs in its liberal arts college and 19 graduate schools. Liaison’s UniCAS solution will streamline and automate the admissions process, delivering a more modern applicant experience, providing access to strategic enrollment data, and maintaining the unique application, workflow and branding requirements for each individual program.

UniCAS is a comprehensive web-based enterprise enrollment management solution that allows even the largest and most decentralized institution to centralize its admissions process, while supporting the individual requirements of its programs and schools. UniCAS provides an institution-wide view of enrollment trends to help identify, recruit, and enroll best-fit students. A state-of-the art application and application review workflow, integrated admission services, and an analytic reporting engine deliver actionable data across all programs to enable strategic decision making. But key to USC’s decision to select UniCAS was the greater control individual programs will have over their applications. Changes to application requirements can be easily configured and administered without the support of IT or other technical resources.

“The Office of Graduate Admission is dedicated to supporting the diverse and complex admission requirements of all of our graduate programs at the university,” said Timothy Brunold, dean of Admission. “UniCAS helps deliver an excellent applicant experience while allowing each program to maintain its unique brand identity and application requirements. Best of all, with UniCAS, our programs can be more self-sufficient when customizing their applications and review process.”

With the UniCAS solution, USC’s admissions capabilities include:

• A centralized approach to institution-wide application management that provides a modern, streamlined applicant experience
• Configurable application requirements and application review workflows to meet the unique requirements of each graduate program, such as letters of reference, or other documents collected in the process by some, but not all programs
• Program-level access to edit, brand and manage individual sections of the application in real time without the need for IT or other technical resources
• Robust functionality specific to graduate admissions including custom GPA calculators, applicant scoring rubrics, flexible interview scheduling and online recommendations
• Access to unified admissions data and a common data structure for a university-wide view of submitted and accepted graduate applicant information
• Analytical tools to forecast and model enrollment trends for current and future applicant cycles to inform recruitment strategies

“The University of Southern California offers some of the best higher education programs in the U.S. and around the world.  As a result, the admission process is competitive and complex, and there are unique requirements across USC’s diverse and prestigious programs and schools,” said George Haddad, CEO and Founder at Liaison. “We’re honored to be working with USC to provide a centralized system to support the mission of the Office of Graduate Admission, while providing students with an exceptional applicant experience, admission officers with the tools they need to meet and exceed their enrollment objectives, and university leaders with transparency to benchmark, forecast and analyze enrollment activity across the university.”

Learn more about how the UniCAS solution provides strategic insight on enrollment management at: http://www.liaison-intl.com/solutions/admissions/unicas/.

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