Design to improve the freshman admissions process

Abstract

Universities are under increasing pressure to decrease operation costs to reduce increasing tuition and to maintain or improve enrollment rates. These two conflicting pressures come to a head with the University Admissions Department, which must meet target enrollment rates within their budget. The admissions department at George Mason University must currently hire outside application readers in order for admissions counselors to complete all fundamental admissions tasks by their deadlines. The hours worked by outside readers accounts for approximately 8% of hours worked by the freshman admissions staff during the reading season. One way of reducing labor costs is by reducing or reorganizing the staff to be comprised of fewer high salary employees. Lower wage employees are less skilled and are limited to performing specific tasks. The goal of this paper is to design the process and analyze the feasibility of reorganizing the admissions staff. To lower system costs and make the process feasible, reorganization must occur without decreasing enrollment rates or increasing the time students wait for service. The design alternatives tested were: (1) the current process, (2) Decreasing the number of counselors and increasing the number of outside readers, (3) Removing outside readers, adding fellows, and specializing tasks between fellows and counselors. and (4) Keeping outside readers and specializing tasks between fellows and counselors. The utility of each alternative from first to last are: 0, 0.290, 2, and 0.376. Alternative 3, removing outside readers, adding fellows, and specializing tasks between fellows and counselors, is recommended, as it shows the greatest improvement of the admissions process out of the alternatives.