A quiet revolution taking place outside education has come to shake the equilibrium of student services maintained to date. Technology has indeed, as people have hoped or feared, beaten a new path to the way we view education, manage it and benefit from it. Meanwhile, students have become increasingly smart about what they want from institutions of higher learning. If a student spends over 70% of his/her time outside a classroom, it is imperative to know where, and on what, the time is spent, so that we may leverage that knowledge for improving student services. This is one of the main points made in the book, “Innovation in Student Services - Planning for Models Blending High Touch/High Tech” (D. Burnett & D. Oblinger, editors), published by SCUP (Society for College and University Planning). I was delighted to do this book review when Terry Calhourn, Director of SCUP Communications, approached me.
The book started with an inspiring piece on how Walt Disney World focused on each guest contact point to improve their service. On average, a Disney guest makes 70 contacts with their representatives. So they took advantage of these 70 chances to impress the guests and to create 70 “magic moments”. It followed by the show-and-tell from the University of Phoenix ñ one of the high growth (107 campuses totaling 103,000 students) and high profit institutions in the world. Its work best summarized the critical notion throughout the book that every student service point must first be clearly identified, followed by an analysis for its purpose, and then given a proper place in a “student lifecycle”.
Each chapter contained a case study of an institution and authored by the representatives of the institution. In almost every case study in the book, the authors would invariably start with their frustrations over lack of responsiveness and satisfaction with existing modus operandi or their appalling discovery of the large number of knowledge silos and bureaucracy layers operating on campuses. K. Dillon at Tufts University called them “cottage industry of student services” (Dillon, p97). These processes and offices have outlived their original purposes and become “barriers” to students. Business services people had been identifying themselves as operational units for business transactions; bursar, financial aid people had been minding their own interactions with students, while no one seemed to have a central view of how these disparate processes and offices function collaboratively. Nobody seemed to know how a learner could navigate through the mythical network of offices and departments on their campus (or on all of our campuses, perhaps). Even new entities such as the university website have started to evolve out of control. SUNY-Buffalo found 17 web servers running 250,000 cataloged web pages, which only represented a small portion of all the uncataloged pages. “This volume of web pages in no way ensured timely access to quality information.” (Wright, et al, p223).
Change was inevitable. Full-scale diagnostic reviews of student services processes ensued. A question asked by these institutions best describes this force of change, “Did the university provide a straightforward, accurate, and integrated planning and registration system that is easily accessible, yet personal and address [students’ needs]?” (King, et al, p200) If we remain sated with our service to students, we are dangerously trying to authenticate the proverb “ignorance is bliss”.
None of the 20 universities (only one community college) was fecund in their ability to regenerate the processes of providing services to students. Neither have they been hesitant about tapping enabling technologies, even ìdisruptiveî technologies, and in utilizing tried and tested methods taught in Business Schools and practiced by CEOs: Business Process Reengineering. Some of them focused entirely on streamlining the processes by working on the concept of One-stop Centers and “webifying” their processes and documents as much as reasonable. SUNY-Buffalo even floated the idea of “click-and-mortar” university. As SUNY-Buffalo put it, web services were not a luxury, but a necessity, a necessity for survival in this new era of unpredictable economic and demographic sea of change.
Business Process Reengineering, defined by SearchEBusiness to be “the analysis and redesign of workflow within and between enterprises”, guided a number of the case studies in the book. Some of them turned out to be enrollment services reengineering. These types of services created a hub with which students could obtain services in a streamlined fashion; such is the case with Carnegie Mellon, Seton Hall, and Western Cooperative for Education Telecommunications (WCET) and the Success Center developed by Johnson County Community College. In the case of Johnson County Community College, the Success Center was a one-stop center from which students could receive adequate services from strategically placed offices with carefully trained staff members. They developed a rich and easily accessible knowledge base. The outcome of their work clearly showed a reduction in redundant visits, shorter lines, increases in the use of online resources, and most importantly student satisfaction.
Portals are a gateway to information and are increasingly deemed as an ideal approach to managing information and knowledge. These are technology intensive projects. Call centers are critical connections between the college and the student through human interaction. It is useful for a variety of settings in which students need to contact the college or vice versa. A number of universities made significant advances on the technology front, such as Ball State University with its portal and call center, Brigham Young University with its highly integrated web based freshman advising and registration system, and University of Texas at Austin with its UT-Direct, a portal, that aimed to achieve a sense of community by bringing faculty, staff, students, alumni under one digital roof. The portal concept has been fully implemented in several of them showcased in the book, such as SUNY-Buffalo (MyUB), University of California (UCGateways), and Louisiana State University (Personal Access Web Services - PAWS). Ball State University’s web based student services include almost everything including, advising, computing services, calendaring, financial aid, grade check, course plan and job board.
A very common theme across the case studies was the need and challenge of staff training and culture change. BYU identified the crux of the matter to be the “human and technology nexus” (Kramer et al, p201). Carnegie Mello University advocated to “simultaneously drive technology and behavioral changes to create competitive advantage.” (Anderson, p151). University of North Carolina - Greenboro realized that “to improve student satisfaction, we must improve staff satisfaction.” (Black, p36). Staff training appeared numerous times in the case studies as a critical success factor. As Johnson County Community College found, “training frontline staff must be extensive and dynamic.” (Pitts, p72). Across the board, those who conducted staff cross training, and separated knowledge workers into generalists and specialists reaped great benefits and helped with project sustainability. Above all, the commitment of the top leadership is critical, as described by Boston College. This is found in many of the case studies in the book.
Kudos to co-editors Darlene Burnett and Dianna Oblinger, this is definitely a book not for professing theories, but to fascinate you with practices and applications of utilitarian means of making things work.
This book is about how to streamline processes of providing/receiving student services. It is about how to use enabling technology to achieve this end. Few projects have ventured outside the traditional scope of student services. It was in the last two chapters of the book when student services was considered as a change agent and to be an integral part of learning that traditionally dominated by student affairs or instructional services. Student services ought to be considered as what matters outside the classroom. Every student service program ought to be considered along that genre. A community college on the west coast has embarked on an ambitious task of moving beyond traditional enrollment management to one that is based on high tech, theories in learner lifecycle, and learner typologies. They branded their work as Learner Relationship Management (LRM). I am anxiously waiting to see the successful completion of the enrollment management evolution from its current form to that of LRM.
If learning is to take place anytime, anywhere, we had better elevate the level of attention paid to the support services that are essential to this. Increasingly, what matters to the enrollment management of an institution is no longer determined solely by one or two offices alone, and is certainly no longer a result of the number of Nobel Laureates, size of the library or the annual alumni donations. What matters, in the eyes of learners, is how convenient a university/college is willing to make the learning; how responsive the institution is to their needs; how many miles the institutions is willing to go to satisfy individual learners. “Learning in classes can be enhanced, sometimes dramatically, by activities outside of classes. Good advice on course selection can make the difference between a happy young scholar and a frustrated one.” (Oblinger, p251). Frustration will easily lead to low retention and eventual perdition.
What is missing from the book? The largest sector of public higher education institutions is conspicuously neglected in the book. One would expect at least a third of the case studies would be coming from these institutions in light of the fact that community colleges are the single largest sector in the 4,000 plus institutions in the U.S. The size notwithstanding, there should have been more of them in the book because community colleges are noted for their faster rate of adapting to change. Short of this, one would hope that the existing models in the book would apply comfortably to community colleges and that more of them will earn honorable mentions in a worthwhile book as such in the future. The book does not touch emerging and maturing notions of knowledge management, learning outcomes and only referenced learner relationship management in the end. This justifies a Volume 2.
What lies ahead for the student services personnel? If a significant number of institutions could just adopt some of the practices documented in the book, our students will be reaping enormous benefits. None of the tasks is easy. Just to implement UT-Direct, 14,745 person hours were spent. This represents about 10 employees completely devoted to it for an entire year. How about culture change, technical challenges, budgetary allocations, and project maintenance that are an integral part of the whole thing and not reflected in counting person hours? It took several years for the project to come to fruition.
But there is very little excuse for us not to take action. Let’s start asking the questions, “What contact points do we have with our students?”, “Are the current service locations arranged logically?”, and “Does what we do make sense to the learner, not just the service provider?”
Wheels do not have to be reinvented. They just need to be realigned.
Book reviewed:
Innovation in Student Services - Planning for Models Blending High Touch/High Tech
(D. Burnett & D. Oblinger, eds). Society for College and University Planning (SCUP), Ann Arbor, MI.
Reference:
http://searchebusiness.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid19_gci536451,00.html
Further information on SCUP student services planning:
http://www.scup.org/studentservices/
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