One-stop UMS centers to assist students

BANGOR – The University of Maine System wants to make life easier for both current and prospective students.

So it has begun working on a new initiative that would enable students to apply for admission, pay tuition, register for classes, arrange for financial aid and take care of a wide variety of other routine administrative needs quickly and conveniently either online or at “one-stop service centers” on each campus.

Also under the new initiative, a single centralized “back-office” processing center for all the campuses would be created to handle applications and student loan collections.

Part of UMS’ reorganization plan, the initiative calls for reorganizing offices, redesigning job descriptions and cross-training employees, said Allen Berger, provost at the University of Maine at Farmington.

The one-stop centers would enable students to get all their questions answered by one highly trained employee instead of being “shuffled from one office to another,” he said recently.

Initially, the centers would focus on helping students conduct routine business. But over time, as students become more accustomed to using the online tools, the centers would specialize in serving those with more complicated needs.

A central “back-office” processing center would enable students to use just one application to apply to a number of UMS campuses. This also should make life easier for high school guidance counselors who would have to submit only one transcript. And it would simplify transfers from one to university to another within the system.

Students who are repaying loans to more than one of the university system’s campuses also should find a more convenient and streamlined process.

The goal is to save money and create efficiencies while improving student services. “When we complete this project we’ll be able to say that the quality of service we’re providing students is on a par with any other university system in the country,” Berger said.

He recently updated the UMS board of trustees on the project which Chancellor Joseph Westphal said was necessary to attract and retain students.

Transacting business online has become a way of life for students, he said. “They are expecting this. This is the way they operate.”

The project is supported by a $300,000 Davis Foundation grant which is paying for the planning and for assistance from consultants.

Ron Mosley, University of Maine at Machias professor and president of the system’s faculty union, said he was concerned that the central processing center “would remove functions from the campuses.”

But he said the union would like to see “better services for students.”

Noting that all seven universities are helping design the project, UMS spokesman John Diamond said the only functions that would be removed from the campuses would be “the burdensome tasks that steal away time that university personnel would prefer to spend actually dealing with students.

“This will be particularly helpful to the smaller universities where personnel often have to handle a multitude of duties because of the size of their staff,” he said.

The goal is to have the one-stop service centers and the centralized processing center up and running by this fall, said Berger. Improving online capabilities would come a little more slowly. “We’re probably looking at another year until there are noticeable differences in the tools available to students.”

But the university system is quickly building its capacity for online admissions applications, according to Berger, who said it’s already being done on some campuses. Paper applications will still be accepted, he added.

Although not yet certain about how much money the project would save, Berger said he didn’t anticipate “a sudden drastic impact” on personnel because the centralized back-office center is being developed gradually.

“If there are any positions that could be eliminated because of the new process, we believe they can be handled through attrition as opposed to layoffs,” said Diamond.

“The focus is on improving services, not cutting personnel,” he added.