Student Information System
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The Basics for Career College Administrators (2023)

If you're a career college administrator or leader who wants a better understanding of Student Information System (SIS) software, you've come to the right place. This article covers the essentials of what an SIS is, what it does, and how it can help your postsecondary career school.

You'll learn the primary functions of an SIS and see how this class of software can improve your institution's operational effectiveness. If you're evaluating SIS solutions, this article will help you make an informed purchasing decision.

What is a Student Information System (SIS)?

A Student Information System (SIS) is a software application that enables a career college or postsecondary school to
- Track and manage all student data, information, and progress
- Run its teaching and financial operations

Also referred to as a Student Records System (SRS), Student Management System (SMS), or Student Information Management System (SIMS), an SIS is a database that maintains a complete record of student activities, as the person moves from interested individual, applicant, and student, to a graduate who has been placed in a job/career, and eventually joins the alumni ranks.

What Does a Student Management System Do?

From curriculum development, class scheduling, accounting and financial administration, to integration with other educational technologies, and compliance and reporting, an SIS offers tools to help college staff operate their "business."

A college management system is used by multiple stakeholders including: students, teachers, administrators, office staff, parents, alumni, integration partners, and vendors.

Think of a bike wheel with the student management system as the hub in the middle, each spoke represents a separate function like: admissions, application, enrollment, class scheduling, grades, accounting, reporting and more.

What are the Key Elements of a Student Information System for Colleges?

An SIS provides comprehensive services to students from their initial interest in a school, all the way through graduation and job placement. It helps teachers, college staff, and management perform their duties, manage the organization's finances, meet compliance requirements, and report on various activities.

General Requirements of an SIS

Because it stores sensitive, personal information, college management software must incorporate security and access control to ensure safe access by different parties. The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) is a federal law that protects student privacy, similar to the way the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) protects medical info. The SIS should be FERPA compliant.

An SIS aggregates and organizes data so that stakeholders can easily search and quickly find information. Sharing data and integrating with 3rd party technologies should be supported.

The best student information systems enable self-service and facilitate better communications among users. They flexibly adapt to an institution's unique workflows. They allow data collection in a user-friendly way and don't disrupt normal staff routines.

Primary Functional Components of an SIS - The Must-Haves

The primary functional blocks of an SIS include:

  • Student Recruitment & Enrollment
  • Academics Administration
  • Accounting & Financial Administration
  • Reporting, Compliance, & Analytics
  • Synchronization/Connectivity/Integrations with 3rd Party Software
  • Security & System Access
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1. Student Recruitment & Enrollment

All postsecondary career colleges compete for qualified applicants. Their university management system should support recruiting efforts by: making it easy to communicate with prospective students, logging those communications, and guiding applicants along the path to enrollment. Some functions an SIS should offer include:

  • Marketing to prospective students
  • Delivering information about the school, its programs, requirements, financial aid, etc.
  • Supporting different modes of communication with applicants, e.g., chat, text, and e-mail
  • Simplifying the application process and automating routine admissions tasks
  • Enabling admissions to review e-mails, conversations, grades, educational history, etc.
  • Analytics to measure lead-to-start conversion rates and advertising effectiveness

2. Academics Administration

Curriculum deployment is an essential function of a postsecondary college.

Curriculum Management

An SIS helps deploy your curriculum, deliver it to students, and track their learning progress. Critical processes that should be supported include:

  • Degree audit tracking
  • Transfer credit management
  • Prerequisite/co-requisite tracking
  • Class scheduling, resource, and enrollment management
  • Transcript management and reporting

An important function of your SIS is how it tracks student progress against certificate/degree credentials. All systems track Credit Hours. More advanced solutions support Clock Hour format and can tie this measure back to financial aid.

Portal Access/Learning Management System (LMS)

After the education plan and class scheduling are set, delivery is the next step. When different workflow processes can be tailored to users, it's easier for instructors to deliver the curriculum, and for students to follow it. Student progress must be continually tracked. Success metrics include:

  • Students - Progress reports, grades and measuring activities deemed critical for achievement
  • Instructors - Student interactions, testing, and assignment grading as part of the curriculum delivery
  • Administrators - Enrollment management (drop/add courses), attendance management, and compliance metrics (grades, attendance, Satisfactory Academic Progress (SAP)) for key reporting periods.

It's rare to find one company delivering best-in-class solutions for every educational requirement. Therefore, a system that supports third-party plug-ins and integrations offers more flexibility.

Colleges also want teachers to spend their time teaching and not managing technology. An SIS with an open platform and features like Single Sign On (SSO) and Application Programming (API)/Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) integration, help accomplish this goal.

Graduation & Placement

As students matriculate, easy, push-button production of transcripts is valuable. The school will need to continue communications with graduates, bestow credentials, track placement, and produce reporting data required by federal/state accreditation agencies--ACCSC, ACCET, ABHES, NACCAS, COE, CAPPS, and IPEDS. The SIS should also support tracking student success on the job.

3. Accounting & Financial Administration

The main mission of an educational institution is to provide opportunities for students to learn, grow, and improve. Performing rigorous financial management is a key element in accomplishing this mission.

Student Accounting

Students incur expenses after they enroll. A user-friendly SIS alleviates the administrative overhead of charging fees and tuition, crediting payments, and tracking payment plans.

An SIS should automate routine processes, accommodate exceptions, and proactively bring attention to upcoming tasks. It should maintain student ledgers, and track receivables and collections for different programs, fees, and payment plans. It should offer a payment portal tied to student ledgers.

Third Party Funding

Students pay for college in many ways: loans, scholarships, and third party funding from federal, state, and Veterans Administration (VA) sources. Accurate payment source tracking can prevent revenue loss and potential legal liabilities.

Finance System Integration / Program P&L Management

The desire to track and allocate expenses by educational program is an advanced function desired by larger institutions. General accounting principles drive revenue recognition and program-oriented accounting activities. When incorporated with student financial accounting, executives will be able to use analytics to measure results. The SIS should offer configurable GL code tools across programs, classes, and fees which synchronize with the general ledger.

4. Reporting, Compliance, Analytics

A modern SIS will collect all the data necessary to successfully operate a college. Older systems, however, struggle to deliver the reporting and analytical tools needed for executive management and regulatory oversight.

Standard & Compliance Reporting

Most systems can produce the requisite reports tracking student progress for grades, attendance, payments and transcripts. Advanced systems have programable elements that "Push" alerts to monitor SAP and other indicators when students may be experiencing problems.

Compliance reports are fairly static and easy to create. A best-in-class SIS delivers tools and automation to monitor progress against compliance metrics, making it easier to generate and submit needed reports on-demand.

Executive Dashboards

An often-cited need by senior administrators is an executive dashboard that highlights workflows requiring attention. Legacy systems force management to scour "pulled" reports and review them manually to identify potential issues.

The executive dashboard should be easily configurable for different roles and responsibilities.

Advanced Analytics

Software engineers prefer that executives clearly spell out the data and information they need, before they write code and reports. The reality is that as soon as an executive sees one report, it likely generates new questions and the need for additional reports.

If the SIS supports ad-hoc programing, the engineering team will be able to turn around new reports quickly and efficiently. Reporting that enables drill down capabilities is preferred.

New analytics tools and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies are being developed that will provide valuable capabilities to those SIS solutions that can support them.

5. Integrations with 3rd Party Software or Synchronization or Connectivity

The ability for an SIS to integrate with multiple vendor solutions enables schools to use their existing applications and add best-of-their-category products in the future. It also protects your software investment from early obsolescence.Some interoperability considerations include:

  • - Financial aid synchronization - connections with third party financial aid servicers through secure File Transfer Protocol (FTP) integration or full 2-way synchronization with DOE servers
  • - Secure login - Single Sign On and LDAP integrations
  • - Attendance tracking - Remote attendance posting for externship/internship tracking
  • - LMS integrations - Through API or full LTI interoperability to enroll, manage, access and track educational progress for students
  • - Marketing lead generation - Enable lead generation posting to social media marketing tools and automate collecting and sharing data between platforms can improve enrollment and revenue
  • - Payment portals - Secure payment portal connections to manage individual or recurring payment processing
  • - Accounting software - Either journal entry or full transactional synchronization to QuickBooks or other business accounting programs

6. Security and System Access

Cloud-based systems have evolved rapidly. As an example, the US Federal Government has actively embraced Amazon and Microsoft web service and data solutions because they are safe and reliable. When evaluating cloud-based systems, consider the following:

Staff Level Access

Configuring role-based security settings for staff is important because different employees require different access to student attendance, progress, and other personal information.

System Security and Access

Many SIS solutions use unique portal address assignments on shared server platforms. Your site’s access should be totally controlled by your administrators. All system access and actions should be logged providing a complete audit trail.

Business Continuity Planning

Remote hosting sites should have fully redundant: power, Internet access, and failover data management contingency plans. Servers should have RAID (triple redundant read/write) hard drives so if any one drive fails, data checks ensure that information is accurate on the other two drives.

Business continuity planning includes an off-site data backup plan and retention policy with daily/weekly/monthly encrypted backups that can be restored at any time.

Defining a failover recovery plan is important in the event that your primary site suffers a catastrophic failure.

Benefits of a Student Information System for Colleges - How Do They Help?

The benefits of college management software are numerous and shared by multiple user groups. By automating and simplifying routine processes, students and staff can focus more time on learning and teaching. Some benefits of a student information system for higher education include:

Student

  • Easier access to information such as class scheduling, account status, etc.
  • Access to real-time grades and graduation progress
  • Financial tracking: view amounts owed and due dates; make online payments
  • Access to class materials and discussion forums outside the classroom (virtually).

Instructors

  • Better student engagement
  • Comprehensive views of student activities in class
  • Easier management of assignments, grades, and student progress
  • Easier management of attendance taking and tracking
  • Electronic records reduce paper handling
  • Easier communications between students, teachers, and staff
  • Faster information retrieval
  • Proactive identification of struggling students can prevent dropouts.

Administrators

  • Easier sharing of information among stakeholders: students, parents, admin, alumni, donors
  • Less time spent gathering and organizing paperwork, electronic communications, etc.
  • All data and information--printed forms, scanned forms, images--are aggregated in a single repository making it easier to find things
    • Data is always current
    • Multiple people can contribute data
  • Better communications between stakeholders
  • Easier financial management: Track payments and collections, monitor cash flow, etc.
  • Efficient transfer of data to outside organizations
  • Cloud hosting means no software or hardware to purchase, maintain, update, and backup
  • Less duplication of effort

Summary - Evaluating Student Information Systems

Initially, you may not have known much about Student Information Systems. Hopefully now, you recognize they're powerful software tools for enabling students to create their own schedules, leverage different learning technologies, track progress, and monitor their educational expenses. An SIS helps college teachers organize their classes, track grades, and efficiently manage back office affairs.

An SIS should be designed and deployed using a "Hub" model.

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A full-featured SIS helps postsecondary learning institutions run their admissions offices, manage their finances, communicate efficiently with stakeholders, and meet compliance requirements. Not only will it help you operate your college more efficiently, it will help your students achieve better learning outcomes.

To learn more about the Orbund Student Information System, schedule a demo by Clicking Here

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