Ridgemont College · 1,840 students
Retired a 19-year-old SIS and three shadow databases in one summer
A four-person administrative team consolidated admissions, records and advancement onto one record, then raised annual fund participation 27% with the history it unlocked.
Results
Measured outcomes
- increase in annual fund participation
- 27%
- enrollment figure across all departments
- 1 number
- first-to-second-year attrition
- −11%
- annual infrastructure cost removed
- $210K
Challenge
Where they started
- The SIS could not be upgraded without a hardware refresh the college had deferred twice.
- Advancement ran on a separate database that received a CSV of new graduates once a year, stripped of scholarship and faculty history.
- Enrollment, registrar and business office each maintained their own headcount, and all three were quoted in cabinet meetings.
- FERPA disclosure logging was a paper form in a filing cabinet.
Approach
What they did
- 01
Migrated students and alumni together
Both populations landed on one record in the same cutover rather than in two phases a year apart.
- 02
Rebuilt aid packaging with net revenue modeling
Discount rate targets were configured into packaging rules before the first offer went out.
- 03
Opened faculty early alerts in term one
84% of full-time faculty raised at least one advising case in the first semester.
- 04
Launched the annual fund on segmented data
The first post-migration appeal referenced the actual scholarship each graduate received.