February 2008 — Admin Systems
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High Marks for E-Transcripts
Delivering academic records electronically offers substantial convenience, time, and cost advantages over paper-based exchange.
WHERE THERE IS MONEY to be saved, school
districts have a keen interest. Which is a way to boil down
what Mark Johnson means when he calls electronic transcript
systems an "attractive value proposition." The
attraction, plainly, is the across-the-board savings.
Johnson is president of the National Transcript Center (NTC) in Austin, TX, which provides transcript-exchange services to academic institutions nationwide.
For example, in Texas, factoring in the costs of labor, materials, and postage associated with preparing and mailing a student's transcript, the Texas Education Agency estimates the state's school districts incur a human resources cost of more than $8.3 million a year gathering and sending off 720,000 high school transcripts to colleges and universities on behalf of the 450,000 students applying to higher education schools nationwide. The TEA says each paper transcript takes approximately 30 minutes to create and process, costing $7.71 apiece. Schools in other states incur similar costs, Johnson says, because the process is the same. By comparison, the NTC charges $5 per electronic transcript sent to non-participating schools from client schools. And the cost per electronic transcript sent between client schools may be far lower, depending on the organization's contract with each state.
In addition to the cost benefits to be had, other forces are creating a blooming interest in electronic transcript systems. An increasingly mobile student population'creating a need for more school-to-school records exchange'–a rising percentage of college-bound high school seniors, and the greater demands being placed on school registrars and guidance counselors are all factors that are persuading states to move away from paper transcripts. Fortunately, many of the nation's colleges and universities are in sync, implementing similar systems that enable them to receive electronic transcripts quickly and easily.
Hitting Critical Mass
According to Clare Smith-Larson, who works in the Office of the Registrar at Iowa State University and has served as a member of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO) Standardization of Postsecondary Education Electronic Data Exchange (SPEEDE, pronounced "speedy") committee, electronic transcripts took off in 1992, the year SPEEDE was formed and began advocating the benefits of data exchange to its members. By 1997, universities began accepting electronic transcripts from local school districts. At Iowa State, for example, the transition away from paper started modestly in 2003, with a single major feeder district and three community colleges. Today 10 to 15 percent of Iowa State's transcripts are received electronically.
