Drop the Persistent K-12 Limitations

Stephen Pilon
Stephen Pilon
Sixth Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant
in Blackbaud Higher Education Solutions™ General Discussions

BBEMS and all parts of the Higher Ed system are meant to be for Undergraduate and Graduate level programs. But we continue to have limitations placed on us that are holdovers from the Whipple Hill K-12 system.

One example is on the apply login screen. If the applicant hits Create Account on the left, it goes to a screen that assumes you are a parent applying for a child. It is possible to use the Existing account option to create a new account, but it is not intuitive at all for applicants. And it seems odd to have to put verbiage in there to effectively say, “If you're new, don't click create an account, because what you really want is the already have an account option, even if you don't, because it is the only on that makes sense for an adult applicant.”

Yes, I am steaming about this a bit. I cannot understand why higher ed institutions are so beholden to the K-12 model still. Is anyone with graduate-level admissions having the same concerns? Have you figured out good workarounds?

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Comments

  • Grant Harrison
    Grant Harrison
    Fourth Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant

    @Stephen Pilon We've seen some of those limitations as well for the K-12 system. We're a K-12 school that is part of the university system, so we have our applications go through a different system, and then we only allow user profiles to be added by us. It requires a school to have the dedicated staff, but it does get around this issue if you can handle the policy of all created users come from ITS.

    With applicants, which number the thousands for us, we export fields out of the external application process and then import the records in. We spend hundreds of man hours uploads the application PDFs manually for each profile, but it's still been best method since that's one of the only pain points. Been requesting for about 5 years to have bulk upload options to EMS so we don't have a week in our application cycle that is just the whole team uploading PDFs on each profile.

    This post was good knowledge to know about the shortcoming

  • Doug Fenderson
    Doug Fenderson
    Facilitator 1 Participant

    We are having the same issue with our applications. It's disappointing to see that there hasn't been any other traction on this issue in over a year, unless it's in a different thread. Let me know if you found a work around!

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