By the time the Nursing Department at Cal State East Bay needed a new online application service to replace its original in-house system, admissions officials there were already well aware of NursingCAS™, Liaison’s online Centralized Application Service™ designed specifically for nursing programs.
“We had some challenges with our previous system,” says one Cal State East Bay nursing admissions staff. “We had a lot of demographic information and questions that we kept adding to it in order to do reports and research. Those requirements, plus the quantity of applicants, got to be too much for our in-house system. They recommended switching to a system that could support a large volume of data.
“We already knew we wanted an online application and we already knew about NursingCAS because other CSU programs were using it. Also, our department chair felt confident in NursingCAS because it’s affiliated with the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN). So, we felt like it was the best match for us.”
Getting Up and Running
Given the wide array of robust features and tools in NursingCAS, there was a lot to learn at first.
“Liaison’s customer service was very responsive,” she adds. “I had a lot of help from them. I did all the online training, too, which was also very helpful. We really didn’t have any major challenges. We needed an online application, we wanted to be able to collect a lot of different data on our students and we wanted to be able to customize questions. That was all available in NursingCAS.”
The Cal State East Bay nursing program also uses NursingCAS to retrieve and report demographic information — such as the ethnicity, age and gender of students — as required by the California Board of Registered Nursing. It also provides data for grant proposals and faculty research projects that evaluate and improve the program’s admissions process.
More Data, Better Communications
“NursingCAS gives us a big snapshot of our students and where they come from,” the admissions official says. “It helps us understand trends and keep track of who’s applying, who gets in and how we’re admitting people.”
“I’m very impressed by — and grateful for — the amount of data you can manage in NursingCAS and the different ways you can search for and message your applicants. The automatic scoring in the system has also helped make our process faster and more efficient. And our notification process is definitely much faster with NursingCAS.
“I think as more and more campuses adopt NursingCAS, its benefits will be apparent to everyone.”