Maximizing Your Degree Audit with Smart Planning and Credential Discovery
Over 50% of two-year and four-year institution students don’t complete on time.
Students face many hurdles that impact their academic journeys, from financial friction to mental well-being. This, however, all stems from a lack of proper academic planning and guidance. Without them, students don’t get a clear path toward on-time completion that considers their individual circumstances and unexpected changes.
Successful planning is critical for ensuring on-time student completion and academic success, and this begins with an in-depth, up-to-date, and accurate academic audit. The next step, then, is to maximize that audit to empower on-time student completion.
The Secret to On-Time Student Completion
The secret to on-time student completion is harmony among degree audit, planning, and credential discovery technology.
These technologies are not new. However, academia has often considered them as separate entities that work independently from each other. In reality, they form the building blocks of an ecosystem that heavily improves student retention and completion.
It’s easiest to think of degree auditing as the foundation of a house. A house’s foundation must be solid and strong to brave the elements. Catalog years, program requirements, requisites, and class sections shift frequently. You wouldn’t want your foundation to shift with them.
That’s why a successful degree audit must remain detailed, updated, and accurate to form that pillar of integrity, as provided by Ellucian Degree Works and Ellucian Colleague Student Planning.
Turning Actionable Audits into Actionable Plans
With a detailed, updated, and accurate audit in place, the fundamental question remains: how do you use this information to help every student find their optimal path to completion?
Some defer to academic planning, and others defer to academic advising. We’re here to tell you that it’s both.
Institutions need a solution that creates automated, self-updating plans from the audit data to:
Keep up with ever-changing student needs and program requirements.
If the plan can’t read and apply an updated audit, what’s the point of an updated audit? When the planner is the planning expert, students and advisors are more likely to execute it.
Transform advising time from scheduling classes to executing a clear plan.
Advisors spend most of their time doing what technology was built for — manually verifying requirements, identifying best-fit courses, etc. Students covet meaningful conversations to answer tough questions about finances, work schedules, housing, and more.
Assist students and advisors in avoiding significant, consequential errors.
Students need to understand the financial and time repercussions of their choices before they commit. Showing them this information with every change allows them to make more informed decisions.
Ellucian’s Smart Plan utilizes degree audit data from Degree Works and Colleague Student Planning to automatically calculate an optimal path for completion, personalized for each student. It self-corrects for any change, whether a new work schedule, a failed class, or something in between. Moreover, it allows students to register directly from their plan, eliminating errors when switching between planning and registration technology.
Smart Plan’s unified planning and registration experience empowers advisors to advise students on how best to execute their plans.
Discover Credentials and Award Students
Students spend much time, passion, and money on their education. It’s often not just about the finish line but being recognized for their journey.
Degree audits can help institutions and students identify outstanding requirements for a degree or credential, but it’s not always a perfect science. That’s because students may have earned an accolade in the process of completing their intended program that they and their advisors don’t know about. Students who depart early may also miss the fact that they are just a handful of credits away from a degree credential, whether it’s their declared one or not.
Overlooking these credentials can make a difference in student retention and completion, especially if they know just how close they are to a degree or credential. Institutions could also be missing out on performance-based funding tied to credentials.
Ellucian Award helps enhance student resumes by finding them more credentials outside their declarations. Beyond that, it helps re-engage students. When paired with Smart Plan, institutions can run ‘What-if’ analyses to show the exact classes that must be completed to complete their goal. The finish line is more transparent and achievable with synchronized auditing, planning, and awarding.
Finding Harmony Between Degree Auditing, Smart Planning, and Credential Discovery
In summary, a good degree audit gives you the necessary fuel to carry your students to completion on time and beyond. Degree Works is the foundational offering that provides a detailed audit that powers Smart Plan and Award.
Smart Plan takes the audit to help students cross the finish line on time and efficiently without wasting their money. Award reads all the requirements for available credentials, analyzes each student against them, independent of declarations, and then points them towards the credentials they can earn.
It's the harmony across these technologies that makes on-time completion more probable.
To see Degree Work, Smart Plan, and Award in action:
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