NUI Galway

New student recruitment system supports postgraduate program growth

NUI Galway streamlines the application process with Ellucian CRM Recruit, delivering an improved experience for staff and students

Student sitting at desk talking on phone

Results

  • A better student experience for applicants—from their first engagement with the university and beyond
  • Applicant-processing inefficiencies eliminated, allowing the university to increase activity within the postgraduate admissions function without having to expand the postgraduate admissions office
  • A self-funding investment, helping to deliver a more sustainable funding model

Summary

The National University of Ireland, Galway (NUI Galway) receives a regular stream of undergraduate applications. However, the university’s plans for future growth is focused on its postgraduate student population. With ambitions to recruit students from the European Union and those further afield, NUI Galway’s 2020 vision is to increase postgraduate intake by over 10 percent.

The higher education sector in Ireland is generally experiencing increases in its international intake, with a growing number of students applying from outside the European Union, from countries including China, India, North America, and Brazil.

For NUI Galway, bringing its full postgraduate recruitment process in-house and streamlining the way it is handled by the admissions office was an important step toward achieving the university’s ambitions.

“The appetite for introducing efficiencies through technology is changing. In order to be a world-class university, we have to be able to provide world-class services, and in order to deliver this we need to have the right systems to support those services,” says Stephen O’Dea, NUI Galway’s admissions officer.

It is this ambition to provide a world-class experience that led NUI Galway to consider a new student recruitment system that would streamline the recruiting and admission processes and support its postgraduate intake.

NUI Galway chose CRM Recruit to help the university consolidate its postgraduate application process by bringing together EU and non-EU applications and taking direct payment for the application fee, as is typical for institutions in Ireland. CRM Recruit also gave NUI Galway flexibility, since the solution can either be used as a standalone system or can integrate with other solutions. “The flexibility of Ellucian CRM Recruit was key because we knew that one size was not going to fit all. We knew there were different ways of doing things. We also wanted to have more control over the way we managed our recruitment processes at NUI Galway,” says O’Dea.

For NUI Galway, Ellucian stood out in the market for its dedicated approach to higher education, which was a key contributing factor in the overall decision-making process when selecting a student recruitment system. “It would have been a risk to go to another vendor that perhaps didn’t really understand the sector or the specific requirements of a university,” says O’Dea. “Ellucian’s expertise and knowledge of higher education, and ability to think creatively, gave us a considerable amount of comfort and reassurance. We wouldn’t have got to where we wanted to be today without the support from the team at Ellucian.”

The implementation of CRM Recruit has resulted in many efficiencies for NUI Galway with a far more streamlined application process for postgraduate applications. O’Dea concludes: “We’ve already started to identify ways in which we can enhance our student recruitment and marketing efforts with CRM Recruit—for example, target our own undergraduate students before they have graduated. Working together with Ellucian, we have shown that we are able to deliver a large-scale systems implementation project, on budget and in time, and do it well. Looking ahead, this has really set the stage for new, exciting initiatives at NUI Galway, and we are excited about the future.”

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Author
Stephen O’Dea
Admissions Officer
The National University of Ireland, Galway
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