Disclaimer: Yes, I am not in a good mood because of the poor performance by the Patriots yesterday and their loss to the Broncos!!! I cannot guarantee that the tone of what you read below is not necessarily the result of this.

Once upon a time, like in the 80s, the Higher Ed institutions were ahead of corporate America in terms of innovations in technology and uses of technology. Now I feel like we are far behind, especially in administrative systems. I am proud to say that at Wellesley, we have found interesting ways to help our administrative offices overcome some of the hurdles, but now that I am responsible for the Registrar’s office and we need to deal with other institutions, it is so frustrating.

I will not name the other institutions with whom we have reciprocal arrangements through which students can take classes in each others’ institution. The whole experience from the student perspective is nothing than a nightmare.

We all have different everything! How do we initiate a student from another school in our systems so that they can participate in our course registration seamlessly, all the way to institutions exchanging grades is nothing but a mess. We just implemented a waitlist system and students from other institutions cannot waitlist without email exchanges because they have not been “initiated” in our system.

The same goes the other way around. When our student register for a course in another institution, the transaction is paper-based. Come on! There are all sorts of timing issues here as well as logistical issues about whether the student is oversubscribing to courses over and above what is authorized. When the paper comes, all these extra conversations take place via email between class deans, the registrar and the students. Why is it so hard for the two institutions to do this electronically to make it flow easily?

Grades are another mess. It comes via email and there are delays associated with this and because different schools’ calendar for the semesters operate in different timeframes, it is even worse. Add to that the time pressure of getting everything ready for commencement.

We are forcing the issue, believe me, and making slow and steady progress. We will do whatever we can at our end, but it takes two to tango. And when one is willing, flexible and agile while the other is not, the outcome is pretty unpredictable.

I understand why we in Higher Ed have fallen behind so much. It is a shame and I don’t see a way out of this in the near future.