Background
UNMC's College of Allied Health Professions (CAHP) offers an extensive curriculum of more than 30 academic tracks covering 15 different healthcare professions. From Physical Therapy to Laboratory Sciences, each program has its own unique proccess for attracting, engaging, and assessing applicants.
Challenge
Consistency vs. customization
Needing to cover the needs of a wide variety of programs, UNMC required a tool that would provide consistency on a college level, while enabling individual programs to assess applicants based on the qualities most suited to their discipline. Although online assessments fulfilled these needs, the admissions teams feared that a virtual experience would feel too impersonal, causing them to miss out on that personal connection with their applicants.
“Being able to use a single tool and use it very different yet in a standardized, consistent way and see this kind of success… I couldn’t be happier with it”
- -Maggie Winnicki, Director of Enrollment Management & Student Affairs at UNMCSolution
A personalized approach on a larger scale
With the support of their dedicated Client Success Manager at Kira, UNMC created a "Kira menu" which outlined several different ways in which programs could use the platform and allowed them to select the options best suited to their individual needs. This flexibility helped the college secure buy-in from each of their programs, by ensuring the assessments were designed by the program while still aligning with the structure set by the college.
Results
Accessible application yields higher enrollment
“More of the students who we’ve offered spots to are accepting those spots and staying,” said Winnicki. With Kira, UNMC has not only had more applicants accept their offer to interview, they've also increased their applicant yield. “We’re not losing applicants through the interview process because it’s more accessible to them,” Winnicki explained. “For some applicants, we may not have been their top pick but through the Kira assessment, we're able to engage and surprise them. We become a school that they’re excited about.”
