AcademicWorks software is great to effectively manage all aspects of the scholarship application, review and awarding process!
July 17, 2018
AcademicWorks software is great to effectively manage all aspects of the scholarship application, review and awarding process!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with AcademicWorks
We use AcademicWorks to award all scholarships offered to students by the Tarrant County College Foundation. With an enrollment of 52,956, Tarrant County College is the sixth-largest college or university in Texas in 2017. AcademicWorks provides the software to effectively manage the process of applying, reviewing and offering a large number of scholarships for students in an ever-growing number of programs, to our student body.
- All colleges and universities have differences in the way scholarships are awarded at their schools. AcademicWorks listens to the individual needs of each college/university/scholarship provider and will either add system enhancements or help users to find ways to best utilize the system to meet their needs/requirements.
- The AcademicWorks help desk is very good about support. They are timely in contact and work to resolve issues quickly and effectively.
- AcademicWorks has worked closely with our IT Department to ensure that the imports and the system will work efficiently despite changes and updates.
- Students need to only complete one application to be automatically matched to hundreds of scholarship opportunities. This is a very efficient use of the applicant's time and efforts to apply for scholarships.
- Our school is unique in that we require a minimum of two references to be completed per applicant and they must be the right references. One must be a teacher/instructor if the applicant has been a student in the last 5 years and the others must be professional level references. To date there is no way for the system to identify and qualify students based on their references, so this process falls to us.
- There are many factors that go into an ROI and it is hard to determine the impact that the AcademicWorks System alone has had. However, I can say that the scholarship committee reviewers that used to help evaluate students using our previous system much prefer the ease of doing the reviews in the AcademicWorks System. This is good because at times some of the committee reviewers have transitioned to become scholarship donors.
At the time that we made the switch, NextGen was not able to offer the option that committee reviewers could rank a student and that their ranking could carry over into multiple scholarships. We already had over 70 committee reviewers and the process to review some of the more general scholarship applicants was taking more than 10 hours. The AcademicWorks System allows each applicant to be ranked by a number of committee reviewers (you set the number of reviewers) one time and the score can be propagated across multiple scholarships. This is an efficient use of the reviewers time and keeps the time commitment manageable.