How a two-person scholarship team at Central Ohio Technical College replaced paper piles with one link

Two people, three pools of money

Central Ohio Technical College is a two-year technical college of about 3,000 students. Its Student Financial Services office combines billing and financial aid in one place, and Faith Phillips has directed it for almost 30 years. Luci Hardesty, a Student Financial Specialist with 20 years at the college, moved into scholarships about four years ago and runs the system day to day.

The college shares its campus and its staff with a regional campus of a large state university, and its scholarship money reflects that. Donors can designate a gift to the technical college, to the university campus, or to a cost-shared endowment that supports both. Three pools, one team, and a growing pile of funds: when Faith started, the college awarded about $300,000 a year. It now awards about $1.2 million a year on the technical college side alone.

Paper, then extracts, then PDFs

When Faith arrived, the college had 10 to 20 scholarships and a paper application that students filled out by pen. As the number of funds grew, the team started pulling what it could from the student information system instead, first an older system and later Ellucian Colleague, so students would not have to tell the college their major or their county when the college already knew.

That removed a lot of forms, but not all of them. Donors write criteria the student system does not hold: residency in a particular township, an essay about community service. Those scholarships kept their applications. Later the college moved applications to an electronic forms tool, which helped students submit but left the office holding PDFs. "It really was spitting out a PDF," Faith says. "So we were still managing paper."

Awarding lived in spreadsheets: a list of students who met each set of criteria, highlighted, offered, and tracked by hand. Offer letters were mail merges into Word, then emailed one at a time.

The real problem was a single point of failure

Ask what made the old process untenable and Luci answers first: "Faith was managing it on her own." Faith was awarding every scholarship across all three pools while running the entire office. The combination of two institutions, a foundation that supports both, and endowments that belong to one, the other, or both made the work too complex to hand off.

"There was no way I could train somebody to do it as manually as I had done it," Faith says. She had first brought AwardSpring to the shared campus through the university side. When the university later consolidated its campuses onto a single system-wide scholarship tool, she made the case that the technical college should keep AwardSpring and relaunched it as a COTC-only instance, with Luci taking on the day-to-day.

"There was no way I could train somebody to do it as manually as I had done it."

Faith Phillips, Director of Student Financial Services, Central Ohio Technical College

One link

The first change students noticed was the simplest. "All we had to hand out to students was a website link," Faith says. Admissions representatives stopped pointing students to a web page of individual scholarships and started saying one thing: go to AwardSpring, that is where you apply for all of them.

Colleague pushes student data into AwardSpring, so the application arrives pre-filled and students answer only the questions the student system cannot: the township, the essay. One application flows into every scholarship a student might match, and the platform tells them what else they appear to qualify for. Faith admits the hard part for her was requiring a real application at all after years of avoiding one. "But because it's so electronic and it's so intuitive, it works pretty well."

On the office side, the paper and the spreadsheets are gone. Selection is select, award the amount, send the offer. The Word mail merges are two clicks. And when a recipient uploads a thank-you letter to a donor, AwardSpring holds it and notifies Luci.

"We didn't have to organize any paper applications. We didn't have to touch any spreadsheets. The selection process was so easy: select, award the amount, send out the offer."

Faith Phillips, Director of Student Financial Services, Central Ohio Technical College

Seeing the whole student before adding another award

The change Faith describes most carefully has nothing to do with speed. Under the spreadsheet process, the team could not easily see every award a student already held. A student might receive a nearly full-tuition award from one of the college's large funds, then match to a hard-to-award one-off scholarship and receive that too.

Now Luci sees the total. When a student already holds a $7,000 award, the team can take that existing support into consideration before adding a $500 one. And it runs the other way: a student who qualifies for only a small scholarship prompts the question of what other resources or support the college could provide alongside it. "It also works both ways," Faith says. The result, in her words, is more awards to a larger unduplicated number of students, and a clear view of unspent funds when a student has not responded to an offer.

"Now Luci can see that the student has already received a $7,000 scholarship, so we can take that existing support into consideration when reviewing the additional $500 request. It also works both ways: we should consider what other resources or support we may be able to provide to the student in addition to a smaller scholarship."

Faith Phillips, Director of Student Financial Services, Central Ohio Technical College

Committees without the copier

Luci's least favorite task is gone. Under the old process she downloaded every application from the forms tool, sorted them into piles by scholarship, made copies for each committee member, and uploaded them to each reviewer in turn.

Where they are now

About 700 of the college's roughly 3,000 students have applications in the system, and Faith would like that number higher; the college advertises well, she says, but students do not read their email. The team has awarded about 252 scholarships so far this year and expects about 300 by year end, since a two-year college starts new students every semester and keeps awarding through spring.

What Faith tells colleagues who ask about AwardSpring at conferences comes down to two things. It is intuitive enough that she, an infrequent user, finds her way in minutes. And the support team answers within a day. "Even though we're a small school, we're managing so many scholarships with so much money," she says. "I can say that this helps us manage that."

"Even though we're a small school, we're managing so many scholarships with so much money, and this helps us manage that. Even if you don't really know what you're doing, you can pretty much start to figure out what to do."

Faith Phillips, Director of Student Financial Services, Central Ohio Technical College