Status: Early Draft (from R.L. Bob Morgan)
Summary: The undergraduate admissions process involves much linkage of student record information among institutions and third parties. Increasingly it involves an authenticated online experience for the student. Federation can offer improvements in record-linking, account establishment, and ease of use.
Current Situation
For most institutions undergraduate admissions might be described as semi-automated. Many traditional human-handled-paper processes have been moved online, but many have not.
[Description of info flow from secondary schools to universities ?]
Many institutions offer authenticated access to online resources to applicants. Primarily the applicant can access a web-based service to monitor (and perhaps update) the status of their admission application. Other services may be offered also. In most cases this access requires the applicant to establish an account ("netid") in the university online accounts system. Admitted applicants retain this account for use as students, while accounts for non-admitted applicants expire. Since in many cases the number of applicants far exceeds the number of admitted students this greatly increases the number of netids the university accounts system must manage. Netid establishment for students often involves paper mail with one-time passwords or other potentially expensive methods.
Many institutions make use of third-party online services such as collegenet.com and applyyourself.com to handle some portion of the online admissions process. A student establishes an account at the service and then can apply to many different institutions. [ Description of info flow to universities from these services ?]
Opportunities for Improvement
1. Federated signon from applicant service to institution
This opportunity takes advantage of the student having an account with the application service (eg collegenet.com) to remove the need for the institution to do account assignment to applicants.
Changes required:
- The application service becomes a federated identity provider (in InCommon).
- Institutional services used by applicants support federated access.
- Netid establishment is changed to happen at admittance time, not application time.
- Other potential process changes to take advantage of authenticated linkage.
The primary benefit of this opportunity is that the institution does not have to create netids for all applicants. Other potential benefits might be:
- Possible elimination of paper mailing to applicant if it is only needed for netid establishment.
- [ Other possible automation improvements ? ]
2. Federated signon from secondary school to applicant service or institution.
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