A broken credit transfer process
Lehman College is the only four-year college in the Bronx of the City University of New York. Lehman faced a challenge felt not only by CUNY natives, but by colleges across the country. More than 68 percent of Lehman’s students are transfer students, putting a lot of pressure on innovation. Until recently, transfer evaluations were a multi-step process, fraught with time constraints, physical travel, and poor student experiences.
"We would send new students to our campus all over uk business email database the place. We would send them a card, we would give them a directory, the form, and we would say, 'Okay, now go find them.' Even when they found professors, sometimes those faculty members weren't there because of scheduling issues or campus advising days [known as CDADs]," shared Christie Lucchese, Lehman College's transfer assessment coordinator.
On the student side, the credit transfer process was daunting. The form to be completed was over four pages long and involved manual entry on behalf of students who then had to physically communicate this information to staff.
From that point on, staff would manually enter the information into a system, which took days (or even weeks) and was prone to human error. Sometimes, if a form was submitted incomplete, the university would suspend the student’s enrollment in classes, preventing them from taking the credits needed to continue their studies or even graduate. Due to the lack of available electronic databases, there was no way to track these forms, how many courses were pending, and how many signatures were required to complete the process.
Both parties experienced significant frustration between peak enrollment periods between January and August, with students often waiting in long lines to see the registrar and staff unable to process all applications in a timely manner. Students were often not notified of the approval or rejection of their credits until September, further impacting the student experience on campus. Quickly realizing that this process was no longer sustainable or productive for staff and students, Lehman College sought to digitize into a smart campus using ProcessMaker.
