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Student Services | Feature
To meet the expectations of today's tech-savvy students, colleges and universities are looking for ways to speed up their processes and provide better services for their No. 1 customer.
For just about any service provider, faster is better. It certainly holds true for higher education, which has increasingly come to view students as customers: Quick customer service has become a priority in student-oriented areas, from parking management to tracking degrees. Looking to stay competitive, colleges and universities have turned to technology to simplify processes, reduce costs, and meet the high expectations of a tech savvy student body. CT looks at how seven schools are solving a wide range of problems all with the goal of streamlining their students’ college experience.
1) Manage Parking Online
Like most universities, the University of California, Irvine had parking problems: too few patient stalls at the university medical center, overflowing residence hall parking lots, and a cumbersome system for managing and enforcing parking.
To alleviate the problem, in 2007 the university designed and implemented the Virtual Parking Management System (VPMS), a web-based application consisting of an Adobe ColdFusion front end with an SQL Server database. According to Ron Fleming, director of UCI’s Parking and Transportation Services, the goal was to create a more flexible, easy-to-use system. “We made it attribute-based,” he notes. “That way, we can turn things on and off as needed.”
The web-based system has a number of advantages. At the medical center, for instance, the receptionist inputs visitor vehicle and stall information, so parking is tracked and enforced more precisely. As a result, the parking department has been able to reallocate some of the visitor spaces–freed up due to regular turnover–for employees who need to park for the day.
On-campus residents now manage their registration through VPMS online, anytime they want. Parking is enforced using a license plate reader on the enforcement vehicles, rather than stickers or rearview mirror tags. As a parking employee drives through a residence parking lot, the readers compare the license plate numbers against the database. If the plate isn’t registered, the reader dings, and a citation is written.
Fleming says the system’s reporting tools have helped the department “reorganize parking in a major way.” Due to more accurate enforcement, people have learned that they can’t park in the wrong lots. The result is a clearer picture of parking needs, more precise parking allocation for residents and visitors, and all-around easier parking. Parking complaints are down and other schools are looking to Irvine as a model. And the cost? It was relatively low once the parking department collected unpaid fines from the biggest violators.
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