Case Study: Law School Admissions

The law school admissions is ridden with tension for applicants, and for admissions offices too. Until recently at CUNY, the process, like at all law schools, started when students filled out an electronic form when they registered for the Law School Admission Test. CUNY, however, also had students fill out addmisional paper forms , and send or bring a paper check for fees (the school does not accept credit cards). Essays, letters of recommendations and other required documents had to be mailed for the most part, but even those competed online were sent to the school in hard copy by the Law School Admissions Council. All paper files for each applicant were collated and placed into a file, grouped into packets of 10 applicants, and then distributed by hand to members of the admissions committee in sequence. The risks were high: papers or whole packets could get misplaced, tracking systems were imperfect and consumed enormous amounts of staff time. Thousands of pages were copied annually, creating huge amounts of paper waste, storage problems and high costs for managing the amount of files. Each year, the files filled multiple cabinets and tens of boxes were sent to off-site storage. Boxes piled up in the space-starved admissions office during and after the review process.

Many schools had turned to paperless admissions, and CUNY was planning to implement a PeopleSoft admissions package sometime on the future, but with no assurances that it would meet the law school's needs for a start-to-finish application.

After reviewing the options it became clear that the optimal solution was to utilize functionality built into the LSAC system that all law students were already using for the LSAT to move to a fully web-based admissions process and eliminate all paper. All submissions and reviews would take place in the LSAC online system, payment by credit card would be processed online by LSAC and remitted to the school (the school raised its fee to cover the processing cost). built in work-flow eliminated all internal paper processing, leaving only the last step (the letter of admission) to be on paper, and even that is expected to go the way of the buggy whip shortly.

Over the course of the next few years, tens of thousands of sheets of paper and thousands of person-hours will be saved, leading to productivity savings, a reduction in storage needs (and costs), and reduced risk. The only costs were for minor computer upgrades (dual-screen monitors). The system will be able to be integrated into the PeopleSoft admissions product so that once admitted, student data will be seamlessly transmitted from LSAC into PeopleSoft, avoiding the re-entry of data that has already been captured by the school. This will further reduce the need for paper records by the registrar. While there was some resistance to the new system at first, most admissions staff and committee reviewers are pleased with the new efficiency. And the office is a lot neater too.