Since peaking in 2011, postsecondary education enrollments have been in decline. For-profit schools saw their enrollments plummet by an average of 12.6% between Fall 2015 and Fall 2018. But in the last year, the decline in for-profit school enrollments has significantly tapered off. Between Fall 2018 and Fall 2019, for-profit college enrollments declined by just 2.1% — a fraction of the 15.1% decline from the year prior. This indicates that for-profit enrollment shrinkage is trending towards 0% and that enrollments may start increasing again soon, which means new opportunity to facilitate growth.
When enrollments do increase, does your school have processes in place that facilitate scaling? Is your school ready to take on an influx of students?
Whether you answered yes or no, there is one piece of technology that you should have in your technology stack to help facilitate growth: an attendance management platform.
Ensuring Compliance, Even During Scale
Standardization is an integral part of scaling operations because it ensures uniformity and compliance. Having an attendance management platform in place ensures classroom processes are standardized across all courses.
When schools take on more students, problems that stem from inconsistent or out of compliance processes get more apparent. Problems like poor reporting, inaccurate data, and late file sharing are amplified when schools have a larger student count.
By creating policies for staff and students to follow, school leadership members are theoretically designing how they want their school to operate while ensuring that it is in compliance with federal regulations. But how can they be sure that processes are actually being followed according to policy? No one has time to sit in each classroom to make sure that it’s starting and ending on time and that attendance is being collected correctly and consistently. Nor can they make sure registrars are receiving their data on time, every time.
That’s where attendance management platforms come in. They’re built specifically to help schools stay in compliance when it comes to timely data collection and record storage, while still offering different options for different learning environments.
Attendance management platforms are especially helpful when schools implement new classes, instructors, or locations. Because an attendance management platform is easy to use and provides accurate and in-depth in data, you can be confident that attendance management processes are being carried out according to policy across every class at every campus from day one.
Increased Oversight Across Campuses
An attendance management platform can also give you complete oversight of the attendance rates of each of your classes. It lets you see exactly which students are checked in or out in real-time, no matter how many students you have.
That way, when you take on more students, you can be sure that you know whether they’re in class or not. You’ll be able to see each class currently in session as well as classes from earlier in the day all on the same screen. Authorized users will be able to know which students are in class or not based on if they’ve checked themselves in or not without having to track students’ locations at all times.
No Additional Work For Instructors And Registrars
For schools still using pen-and-paper attendance collection, having more students per class can mean more work on the part of instructors, whether it be spending more time to take roll or manually entering more attendance data into their systems.
But because attendance management platforms can automate attendance collection, the amount of work for instructors will not increase because they have more students enrolled in their class. In fact, attendance management platforms offer the potential to completely take away the responsibility of instructors to conduct attendance and upload the data to the SIS.
Because attendance management platforms tend to run on web and mobile software, students can check in and out of class digitally without the instructors having to spend class time on attendance collection. Since the data is recorded digitally, it can be automatically synced to a school’s SIS, reducing the need for physical file storage on campus and making it easier for registrars to access attendance data when they need it. And because attendance data is recorded digitally and stored in the cloud, registrars don’t have to wait on late data, chase down instructors for paper attendance sheets, or maintain inconvenient physical file storage.
When enrollments increase, leadership of schools using an attendance management platform can rest assured that scaling student populations won’t create additional stress for instructors and registrars when it comes to scaling attendance management.
Set Yourself Up For Success
Implementing new technology to help standardize and streamline processes is essential for schools looking to take on larger student populations, add more cohorts or programs, or open new campus locations.
Successful scaling is much easier by having an integrated technology stack that ensures compliance, increases oversight, and automates manual tasks. For more details about how an attendance management platform will help you prepare for future increases in enrollment, schedule a personalized demo of the CourseKey platform below!
