Hello!

I work in the Development office at a boarding school. I am doing a freelance project with the Admissions Office and I am trying to help them sort out their coding. Here's the situation.

It seems they have about 25 "Statuses" that they are constantly changing on their bio 1 tab. They didn't know about the Status History Log, so in order to query Statuses that have changed, (for instance, how do you tally # of New Inquires for March '02?) they would add a corresponding Action and query on that. Very cumbersome.

To me, not really knowing Admissions that well, it seems there should be like 6 or 7 blanket statuses (such as New Inquiry, Application Submitted, Student, Alum etc..) with subsets (such as application received but pending financial aid) in checklist OR actions. Like a flow chart or a hierarchy.

Would love to know how other schools handle the tracking and coding in admissions, given the constant state of flux with regard to student status. Thanks. Does this make sense?

That's exactly the same situation we found ourselves in. We are now using Current Applicant as the status and then using tracks, checklists, and attributes to keep other statistics on the applicant. The specific completion date is attached to the checklist items within the track. Open House attendees or School visits are tracked in attributes...not every one of our applicants participates in these so it makes sense not to include them on the checklist. Within the high school track are checklist items that are required for every applicant---application received, high school placement test taken, registration deposit received, etc. Hope this helps. Kathy Coccia Database Administrator U of D Jesuit High School & Academy

I am not sure if this will exactly answer your question or not but we start out with all of our applicatns for the upcoming year having the status of "Current" then they move to "Applied" if they submit an application. They then become "Complete" once their checklist is totally complete of all required fields. We also give a status of "Mailing List" if they have done something else to show interest but haven't applied yet. For every status or status change they are given an action to show why the change was made that way queries can be run for that action and a breakdown for statistical purposes can be done.