IT management for schools and universities requires specialized knowledge and experience. Some IT departments face challenges that they can’t overcome alone. Integrating new enrollment and tuition payments systems is one such challenge that can prove daunting, but not impossible.

Columbia Advisory Group offers technical consulting services to organizations like schools and universities, hospitals, and a variety of retail locations. These services include integrating data feeds into usable, unified formats. Organizations can then use this information to help them achieve specific goals like improving recruitment, enrollment and retention.

Schools can use student data analytics to support decisions regarding enrollment, course schedules, outreach, tuition projections, room usage, and many other topics. We can also help improve university IT services and the school’s cybersecurity policies and implementations.

Texas A&M University tasked Columbia Advisory Group’s ERP specialist team with creating a recruiting and candidate tracking system. Additionally, they asked the team to generate a data clearinghouse to facilitate enrollment and tuition payments across the ten participating colleges and universities within the Texas A&M University System so that students had a seamless system allowing them to take courses from multiple institutions.

The specialist team faced several challenges. Each campus had separate groups of student information systems, including various versions of Banner. The separate systems meant that tuition and administrative data was isolated on each campus. The team had to analyze each data system and the recruiting needs of each campus to develop an effective system.

The CAG team created data feeds from each campus that aggregated into one database. Students were then able to use one interface to take courses from any institution. Real-time data feeds meant that information was immediately available to each member institution to help them make business decisions.

This new system allowed payments to be made to a central location and then sent to the respective institution. Students were given a single system log-in to view their courses and grades. Having a single access point achieved the important goal of creating a simplified student experience. Without the new system, admission levels might have dropped if prospective students faced a complex enrollment and payment procedure.

Columbia Advisory Group helped make it possible for the Texas A&M University System to increase enrollment for member universities. The system CAG helped design is flexible and can be scaled to match enrollment growth. Columbia Advisory Group can develop new functions for the system when needed.

Columbia Advisory Group can help innovate IT services in education industry settings. Their 100+ years of combined experience can improve the business performance of any institution. They can harness the power from student data analytics to deliver solutions that many other teams can’t.