Say you're a transfer student. You took Accounting 201 at your old college. Now you want to get into Accounting 202 here and you need a prerequisite waiver. The process for getting that done: contact your college advisor by phone, fax, or e-mail. No forms, no lines, no fuss.
Contrast that simple process with the one some alums will remember with a shudder. Until last year, getting the waiver required going in person to the appropriate advising center to get a signature on a form and then walking back across campus to hand-deliver that form to the registrar's office. "By this time, chances were good that the class would be closed," said Pam Hicks, who now oversees enrollment management. So then the student had to go back to the college to get yet another signature on a form for admission to the full class and return, once again, to the registration line.
Today's students also can apply, register, and pay-all online. They can check the status of their financial aid and their credits toward graduation. When the semester's over, eager students can view their grades online rather than trekking to campus to check the posting at their instructor's door.
The high school transcripts of prospective students from the Clark County School District are automatically transmitted to UNLV-saving the students time in requesting the records, UNLV time in data entry, and the district the time and postage required to mail paper copies of 8,000 transcripts each year.
By removing people from mundane processes, technology has provided behindthe- scenes fixes to the bottlenecks created by UNLV's rapid growth, and it's delivering service in the way the Internet generation wants it. But that's not at the expense of the personal touch, notes Rebecca Mills, vice president for student life. "We're not using technology as a substitute for human interaction, but as a way to free up employees and students both for more meaningful interactions."
Advising centers now staff a hotline to ensure that when the phone rings, a person answers it. Another example: the "Ask Me!" information booths that dotted the campus at the start of the semester this fall. Employees from all units manned booths to answer all those start-of-the-semester questions, like "Which 'Beam' building is my class in?"
"Part of the vision is being deliberate in how and when we communicate with students," Mills says. "We know that at certain points in their academic careers we should actively communicate with them rather than expect them to come to us. Seven weeks into the new semester, we need to inform them about the stress-management workshops we offer. The first week of school, we need to help them find their classes."
To improve responsiveness and service, UNLV is doing more than ending frustrating processes for the ever-increasing student body; it's creating an atmosphere in which students can take advantage of all the services UNLV offers to help them reach their academic goals.
"I'd much rather see students studying in the library, working out at the rec center, or participating in a service-learning program than standing in line outside enrollment management," Mills says. "We want to free up the time they used to spend conducting the business of a student so they have time to be engaged in and enjoying the life of a student."
