Admissions decisions stay with people
The Education pack does not score, rank or decide on applicants. Who decides, who approves, how to record reasons, and what belongs in other systems.
By Achekam · · 4 min read · For Education businesses in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya
Launching soon. The Industry CRM add-on described in this article is launching soon. This article describes it as it will work at launch.
"Does it rank the applicants for us?" is one of the first questions a registrar asks about admissions software. It is a fair question. Intake season is busy, the pile of applications is tall, and a system that sorted them into "yes", "no" and "maybe" would save a lot of reading.
The Education pack in Achekam's Industry CRM deliberately does not. It does not score applicants, it does not rank them and it does not make admissions decisions. People do, and a named person approves each one. This article explains that choice, how decisions flow through the pack, and what you should keep in the other systems your institution runs.
What the pack will not do for you
To be precise about the limits:
- No scoring. The pack does not give an application a number based on marks, background or anything else.
- No ranking. It does not order applicants against each other.
- No automatic decisions. No application is offered a place, waitlisted or turned down by the system.
That matters for more than modesty. An admissions decision changes a person's education and sometimes their career. When a decision is challenged, by an applicant, a parent, a funder or a regulator, the institution has to explain how it was reached. "The software ranked her lower" is not an explanation anyone can examine. "The admissions officer assessed the application against the published requirements, and the head of admissions approved the decision" is.
Who decides, and who approves
The application intake workflow routes each application to an admissions officer, who owns it. The officer requests the supporting documents, logs each one as it arrives and assesses the application once the file is complete.
The decision itself is made by that person. The workflow then has the head of admissions approve the decision the person made. Two people are involved in every outcome: one who has read the file and one who checks the reasoning and signs it off.
The stages make the order visible. An application moves from Enquiry to Application received, Documents complete, Assessed, Offer made and Offer accepted. Because some stages in the Industry CRM have conditions a record must meet before it can enter them, the path cannot be skipped casually: an application cannot reach Offer accepted, for example, until the applicant's signature task is done. How the whole path works is set out in applications from enquiry to accepted offer.
Writing down the reasons for a decision
A decision approved by a second person is only as good as the reasons recorded with it, and the pack does not write those reasons for you. Keep the note with the application's file, next to the documents it relied on. That file holds personal information about the applicant; in South Africa, the official text of the Protection of Personal Information Act sets the conditions for processing it lawfully. Whatever form it takes, a good decision note answers five questions:
- Which requirements applied? Name the programme and the entry requirements in force for this intake.
- What evidence was considered? Refer to the documents logged on the application, not to memory.
- What was the outcome? Offer, conditional offer, waitlist or decline.
- Why? In a sentence or two, the reason the evidence led to the outcome.
- Any exception? If the decision departs from the usual requirements, say who allowed the exception and on what basis.
Write it so that a colleague who never met the applicant could read the note a year later and understand the decision. That is also the note the head of admissions should be reading before approving.
Not a student-information or learning-management system
The Education pack follows applications and enrolments, the documents that support them, the offers and acceptances, and the fee plan of instalments. It is not a student-information system and it is not a learning-management system, and it does not try to be either.
| Keep in the Education pack | Keep in your student-information or learning systems |
|---|---|
| Enquiries and applications, and their stages | Class lists, timetables and room bookings |
| Supporting documents requested and received | Marks, results and academic transcripts |
| Admissions decisions and their approval | Attendance and discipline records |
| Signed offer acceptances and fee agreements | Course content, assignments and online learning |
| The enrolment's fee plan of instalments | Graduation and certification records |
The pack also sets its own vocabulary: customers are called Students, and the record types, stages, workflows, document requests and documents to sign are those of an institution. That keeps the admissions office's screens familiar without pretending to be the academic system.
Why this split works
Admissions, fees and academic records answer different questions for different people. The admissions office wants to know where each application stands and what is missing. The finance office wants to know who has agreed to pay what, and when. The academic side wants to know what each student is studying and how they are doing. Keeping the first two in one place, with the decisions made and approved by named people, and leaving the third to the systems built for it, avoids a single tool that does everything a little badly.
Before the next intake
Decide who your admissions officers are, who approves as head of admissions, and what a complete decision note looks like for your institution. Put that standard in writing and share it with everyone who will assess applications. Then make sure the finance office knows how fees are taken once a place is accepted; fee instalments as part payments and what to do with overpaid fees and leavers are good places to start.
General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.
