George Bernard

I developed a Student Retention enhancement to the Campus Solutions Student Records module. The enhancement let faculty indicate a student's risk level via the student grading page. Prior to the enhancement, the faculty and the dean's office staff did not have a way to formally communicate when a student was academically at risk. This communication improved the retention rate for students at Heald College by 20%, an increase from 75% to 95%.

Using the improved capabilities on the grading page, the faculty indicated the student's risk level by choosing a distinct color: Green, yellow, orange, or red that is both easy to see at a glance and widely associated with four corresponding levels: Good, warning, alert and danger. In addition, faculty could record risk factors such as lack of transportation, childcare, housing, job loss, etc. Once added, the information immediately appeared on all faculty and dean's office staff pages. The enhancement presented all pertinent student information on a single dashboard for the dean's office staff, adding notes and automatically generating workflow task lists. Staff could easily follow up with students.

I was working at a client's site when I received a call mid-week from PeopleSoft requesting that I immediately fly to the first university to deploy CS student records (SR), student financials, and financial aid (FA) into production. Upon arrival, I met with the school's provost and the IT staff. It was a desperate situation. The local TV stations were running nightly news stories regarding the hardships students were experiencing due to the new PS software at the university. The most pressing problem was FA not generating checks for most students who depended on the money for living expenses. The students were angry and demonstrating in the FA building.

I determined the issue resulted from registering students in SR only into the current term and not loading students' history, which resulted in SR designating all students as freshmen. But in FA, students were awarded their actual grade level, i.e., senior. The freshman designation in the SR to FA interface caused a mismatch that locked up the awards page for upper-class students, preventing the printing of checks from the page.

I was able to fix the issue and had checks printing on the third day I was on site.