For applicants, EngineeringCAS offers a single portal which streamlines their process for researching and applying to multiple programs of interest, offers a modern application experience that guides them through the process and provides 24/7 access to real-time updates on applications.
For programs and institutions, EngineeringCAS drives awareness, streamlines the application process and provides tools that enable targeted, personalized communications to those interested in a program; decreases decision-making times by providing a processing team to scan transcripts and package application components as an extension of an admissions staff; and provides insight into enrollment trends and performance on a campus through robust analytics and reporting tools.
“The potential that I see in EngineeringCAS is almost limitless,” Poole says. “It brings together all the aspects that you would need within enrollment management.”
Yet Poole, a member of the EngineeringCAS advisory board, is perhaps even more passionate about the CAS platform’s benefits for the entire engineering discipline, as well as graduate education as a whole.
“In higher education, the majority of the focus really has been on undergraduate education,” he reflects. “The graduate admission enrollment management community has been completely disjointed. There was nothing bringing that community together. One of the things that really attracted me to Liaison and the CAS was their ability to build communities within and across disciplines at the graduate level. They bring people together who are working with the same set of challenges, issues and budget constraints to share best practices in terms of how the CAS can assist both the students and the institution, but also to have a forum to discuss issues, concepts and ideas.”
Poole continues, “Many times on the enrollment management side in graduate education, we’re working in a vacuum. But the more we work together, the stronger we’re going to be as a community of educators and institutions. In the long run, that will only help the students we serve in their education and career preparation.”
Under UMCoE’s previous enrollment management vendor, the engineering school maintained separate processes for gathering applicants’ biographical information, letters of recommendation, transcripts and test scores. The admissions office created and then manually updated spreadsheets to track applicants’ progress in the process, while yet another portal was used to communicate with applicants.
“Everything was very much segmented and used multiple systems to process each particular student,” Poole recalls.
Poole says he heard from other University of Miami programs, which were already using CASs, that “the students seemed to be really happy that they only had to submit one set of transcripts and one set of letters of recommendation, and were able to utilize the documents for multiple applications that they would have, while the programs themselves were even able to communicate directly to students within the same portal.”
“CAS had all of those things built into it, as a one-stop shop,” he says.
Furthermore, Poole was excited to learn that EngineeringCAS provided “an opportunity to log in just one time, to see data on the dashboard and view a group of students who may not have completed an application and start communicating with them rather than logging into another system and doing it.”