online-admission-forms

5 college online admission forms offices should provide


With college application season well on its way, admissions offices need all the help they can get; and online admission forms can help.

Online admission forms can keep an admissions team organized and efficient, as well as reduce stress when waves of applications come pouring in all at once. And what admissions offices might not realize is that anyone can create them with today’s drag-and-drop online form building software tools.

Below are the top five types of online forms to take advantage of this application season.

1. Scholarship Application Forms

Scholarship application forms are the tried-and-true way to find the most deserving students for your school’s illustrious scholarships. Be careful not to overwhelm students with too many form fields, but it’s a good opportunity to allow students to upload files such as resumés, essays, and more. Scholarship application forms should also include a few open-ended questions that let students tell their story and explain why they’d be a good recipient.

2. Application Admission Forms

The form of all forms for any admissions office: the college application. Every single applying student has to submit one, with every response combed over with great detail by admissions offices. Your next class of students will come about as the result of these forms, and how your department processes the information submitted. Forms are perfect not only for collecting applicant information, but should be sorted in the backend for easier review. Save time by sending your form responses to a central spreadsheet so you can quickly sort applicant information by location, GPA, or other relevant stats.

(Next page: Online admission forms 3-5)

3. Recommendation Forms

Recommendation forms are a terrific way to keep an applying student’s recommender responses all in one place. A branded, official form from your school increases the likelihood the recommendation form will get filled out by an educator or counselor, unlike asking them to respond via old fashioned email. Make it easy for prospective students to gather recommendation forms and for your organization to receive them.

4. Candidate Interview Evaluation Forms

If your admissions office or college department requires applicants to interview for available spots, an evaluation form is the best way to manage and organize candidates. If the interview process requires input from multiple admissions and department reps, it’s especially helpful to have the answers streamlined and collected under the same format. A helpful tip is to include both open-ended fields on the evaluation form to allow for longer feedback and comments, as well as star ratings to be able to assign numeric values to interviewees based on their strengths and program fit.

5. Campus Visit Scheduling Forms

Campus visits might be the single best marketing tool to drum up enrollment for your university, so make it easy (and exciting!) for prospective students to check out your campus with a friendly online schedule-a-visit form. As for the form itself, stick to the basics: name, email, interested majors, and add a date-selector field to make it easy for them to tell you when they’d like to come. It’s also important to include this simple form in a highly visible spot on your website, ideally above the fold. You can also deck out your form with beautiful photos of campus, and a logo to make it official.

Creating and editing admissions forms used to require the help of IT, but that’s not the case anymore. Any employee in an admissions office can create and manage all of the forms above with the right form building tools, plus be able to manage and share all of the data collected with the right departments.

Have you created your own admissions forms? What tips do you have? Let us know in the comments!

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