Empowering Staff and Students: Hawkeye Community College's Journey With DualEnroll

Who: Hawkeye Community College in Waterloo, Iowa

Concurrent Enrollment Count: 3,000

Challenges: inefficient workflows, lack of information visibility, disconnected systems resulting in duplicated work, and hard to catch human error

Benefits: a one-stop shop for registration, real-time access for college and high school staff, simplified onboarding, and process improvement

Managing Three Thousand Students with a Small Team

Hawkeye Community College, in Waterloo, Iowa, has a concurrent enrollment program of almost 3,000 students across 25 districts, making up just over 50% of the college's total enrollment. Program Director, Sarah Topliff, jokes that it’s like the program is a whole college within a college–except it only has an office of three.

“We discuss the program with prospective students, manage registration and admissions, plus advising, billing, instructor credentialing, and professional development…” explains Topliff. Needless to say, managing concurrent enrollments is a huge lift, which is why the program’s software and systems play such a vital role in individual and overall success.

Being Bogged Down by an Old System

Topliff started as an admissions specialist at Hawkeye in 2017 and credits that the concurrent enrollment program’s old home-built system worked relatively well for what it could do. The problem was that the functionality was too limited and disconnected from other systems, requiring extensive manual administration to fill in the gaps.

The old system was a website dashboard, but even though it was electronic, actions were very much manual. The team had to manually enter items and move them back and forth through queues–there was no automation or integrations with other databases. There also wasn’t a centralized way for users across the college and high school to communicate on next steps, like when the college needed a high school to verify a placement test.

Hawkeye also had to double-build courses, first in their dashboard system and then in Colleague, the college’s student information system (SIS). There was even a full-time person in the registrar’s office dedicated to doing just that. Students had to duplicate efforts, too, logging into one system to do an admissions application, then using a second registration system, and waiting on manual processing to sync everything up. Not only was this extra time-consuming, but it created a huge liability for human error.

“When you're talking 3,000 students, and it just kept growing every year, it was unmanageable,” says Topliff. “It wasn't that errors happened a lot, but every error was inevitably a big deal where we wouldn't find it until it was too late.”

Making the Move to New Software

Topliff began to advocate for finding new software that could help clean up their processes and enable staff to spend less time manually managing student lists and emailing stakeholders in decentralized channels. Eliminating the higher rate of human error from manual data entry was another key goal.

When learning about potential new solutions, Topliff was drawn to DualEnroll for its functionality, but also because of the people behind the software. Knowing that DualEnroll came with real human support and resources was a huge selling point for Topliff and her small department.

“I had met members of the team and got to know them,” says Topliff on her research process. “It felt important to have names and faces and people to reach out to.”

This connection proved valuable during implementation as Topliff recounts how DualEnroll team members really took the time to talk through Hawkeye’s specific processes and make sure the new workflows were just right. The implementation conversations even helped Topliff interrogate why things were being done in certain ways and make process improvements across departments.

Cutting Down on Administration with Streamlined Registration and Centralized Access

Since going live with DualEnroll, Topliff has been exceptionally pleased with the program's new streamlined and centralized processes. Hawkeye has seen significant time savings for their college staff, high school counselors, and students.

“Previously, we would be constantly monitoring a queue of 500 students on hold, and we had to email the relevant counselors and wait for them to respond...” says Topliff. “Now the next steps just happen–we don't even have to think about it. Resolving a registration takes me two minutes instead of days.”

Because DualEnroll integrates with Colleague, there’s also no more double-building either. The registrar’s office no longer needs a full-time person dedicated to that manual duplication, and that staff member was able to move into a more impactful role at Hawkeye.

The in-person registration events that Hawkeye runs at high schools each semester have also greatly improved since using DualEnroll. Topliff finds that because of DualEnroll’s easy registration portal, it only takes a short time to direct students to the website and have them complete the registration steps. This leaves a lot more time for having meaningful conversations with the students to advise on educational goals and course selection.

Rave Reviews from High School Counselors

The time savings are significant for high school counselors too. Counselors previously complained that they found themselves torn between helping students with more immediate needs and walking students through the concurrent enrollment process. Now, counselors say it’s easy to direct students to DualEnroll’s online enrollment portal that will guide them through registration steps in one go. While the counselors easily see their queue of required activities highlighted when they log into the platform.

“If a student wants to know what's going on with their registration or a counselor wants to know about something at their school, they just log in and see. There's no more waiting for us to respond. Everything is at your fingertips in real-time now,” says Topliff.

In a recent survey that Topliff sent out to high school partners, feedback about DualEnroll was overwhelmingly positive. Counselors mentioned that DualEnroll was “a user-friendly and great environment,” and “easy to navigate,” and that “registration has been quick and efficient,” and “such a breeze”. Similarly, Hawkeye staff can’t speak highly enough about the support they receive from the DualEnroll team.

Simple Onboarding for New Users

It’s not just current users who are benefiting from DualEnroll, but future users too. Topliff knows how hard it is for new staff to get up to speed on concurrent enrollment, and she sees using DualEnroll as one thing they can control to make everyone’s lives easier.

“For anyone that comes into this office brand new, it'll take you a year before you're confident answering the phone because we're dealing with so many different nuances. Nothing is black and white with concurrent enrollment, but when it comes to DualEnroll–that's the easy part,” says Topliff.

Topliff shares that it only takes a couple of days for a new user to meet expectations on their tasks in DualErnoll. She finds that after going through the basics of how to filter and run a report, the rest is streamlined and easily presented to users.

Continued Growth

Hawkeye saw concurrent enrollments increase by 10% and 8% in the first two semesters since going fully live with DualEnroll’s Registration module.

If you’d like to learn more about how DualEnroll could help improve your college’s dual or concurrent enrollment processes for staff and students, we’d love to chat.

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