With Robotic Process Automation or RPA, university staff find themselves equipped with a tool that not only simplifies their work but also saves a considerable amount of costs and time.

According to a survey by Grand View Research Inc., the global RPA market size is expected to reach $30.85 billion by 2030 and expand at a CAGR of 39.9% from 2023 to 2030.

The need to deliver excellence has led many higher educational institutions to adopt newer technologies over the years. While these technologies have delivered significant benefits toward student learning, the teachers and other staff too, need some respite from time-consuming processes such as administration and student servicing.

Technology has helped mitigate costs, enabling institutions to use the savings for infrastructure upgrades, which further enhances the learning experience, etc.

Table of Contents:

What Is RPA in Higher Education?

Higher education relates to using software bots to automate rule-based, iterative, and repetitive tasks across different academic and administrative functions.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) increases productivity, eliminates mistakes, and releases staff to engage in more strategic work.

In higher education, RPA plays a significant role in data handling with a large number and in simplifying complex processes like admissions, fee processing, management of student records, and tracking of compliance.

Top Features of RPA Applicability in Higher Education

  1. RPA can be used in every department for various kinds of admin-related or education-related tasks.
  2. RPA can perform high-volume tasks and processes without continued human presence.
  3. It supports the educators and institution staff to offer high-quality educational resources to students.
  4. RPA solutions are scalable and flexible to changing requirements. These range from processing thousands of student applications to responding to thousands of queries within a real-time clock during admission season.
  5. Automation of laborious tasks decreases the costs of running the operations and promotes the cost-efficiency of institutions.
  6. /7 availability of bots running processes like handling student queries, grading, and checking for compliance means that these processes are performed without glitches.
  7. By automating routine administrative tasks, RPA enables institutions to deliver precise information on time to students while providing personalized attention and fast response time.

Also Read: Top Higher Education Trends Emerging in the Post-Covid Era

Uses of RPA in Higher Education

We will now look into some of the use cases of RPA in higher education:

1. Student Acquisition

The student acquisition process usually involves several labor-intensive tasks. The admin staff has to go through individual student application forms, assess and validate the documents, check their eligibility for the applied course, shortlist candidates, etc.

They may also find themselves overburdened with multiple roles during peak seasons, which fluctuate over the academic year. Also, manually performing these tasks may result in delayed responses, depending on the volume of work on that particular day and the available capacity.

RPA can help universities in the following ways:

  1. It can reduce the student acquisition workload by setting up bots for instant clarifications.
  2. Using RPA, higher educational institutions can define parameters for evaluating and cross-checking application forms.
  3. They can automate processes like checking the eligibility criteria and shortlisting candidates.
  4. These virtual bots offer scalability and efficiency, especially when there are too many applications to evaluate.
  5. There would be no need to hire additional resources or add to your existing resources’ workload or costs.
  6. This automated process results in quick turnaround time compared to manual efforts, saves a significant amount of cost, and ensures process accuracy.

According to a report on RPA, participating organizations have claimed a 92% improvement in compliance, 86% in productivity, and 90% in quality/accuracy along with a reduction in costs by 59%.

2. Student Servicing

An educational institution has to have an efficient system to manage the student servicing process. Student servicing includes various things such as dorm room allocation, class schedules, attendance, reminders, sports, internships, job applications, travel requests, other benefits, etc.

  1. Automation can help the staff process all these services smoothly, ensuring that each student’s needs are properly met.
  2. RPA helps automate the attendance tracking process, enabling organizations to retrieve accurate data on the time staff login.
  3. RPA technology can automatically mark attendance when a student enters the premises.
  4. You can set up the tool to send automated notifications and reports to parents, students, and teachers if attendance is below the minimum percentage required.

3. Financial Reporting

Several students apply for financial aid and student loans. The admin staff has to go through each of the forms, check the eligibility criteria, and process it further. This process often takes up a lot of time. Once again, educational institutions can leverage RPA to automate these tasks.

  1. RPA can automate payroll processing, vendor management, etc.
  2. You can check the institution’s financial statements against the ledger to identify duplicate or non-compliant invoices.
  3. It can help authorities automate eligibility for financial aid and student loans and share information with students about their loans or aid applications.
  4. You can track invoices and due dates through automated reminders so that such delays or miss-deadlines are not made.
  5. Organizations can keep track of every financial transaction through automatic accounting and flag inconsistencies to avoid non-compliance risks.
  6. It also helps in automating report creation of financial statements to stakeholders, trustees, or government institutions

4. Processing Grades

RPA can be used to automate student reports with grades extracted from the database. Instead of adding grades for each student manually, RPA technology offers efficiency in maintaining student report cards. Also, the tool can automatically send the reports to the student’s parents. Here are some other ways RPA can assist you:

  1. Retrieve grades from testing systems or any Learning Management Systems and generate high-grade, high-detail student grade reports.
  2. Include attendance records, assignment grades, and general improvements in the student report, and automate grades to institutional databases.
  3. Reduce the probability of low errors due to handed or inaccurate data entry.
  4. Aggregate scores of various assignments, quizzes, and exams in one place and calculate the final score;
  5. Automatically send grade reports directly to parents and students through email or the student portal.
  6. Automate comments or feedback based on student performance and ensure that students understand areas of improvement.

5. Virtual Assistants

Virtual assistants include chatbots, SMS bots, ringless voicemails, etc. They can mitigate human efforts related to answering queries. Here are some ways in which RPA can help:

  1. A chatbot essentially simulates human conversation and can answer general queries.
  2. Queries and concerns related to admission schedules and processes, etc., can be addressed instantly.
  3. Instead of assigning a staff member to answer these queries, virtual assistants can, with the help of NLP and AI, understand natural language, learn from past data, and respond to queries appropriately.

6. Setting Up Meeting Schedules

An educational institution organizes several meetings throughout the year. In a typical scenario, a member of the staff will have to check the availability of the attendees, prepare a schedule, and send out email invites.

  1. RPA can perform this task by checking everyone’s schedule and drafting an email communicating the time and location of the meeting.
  2. In case of a change in the time or place, the tool can reschedule the meetings effortlessly.

Robots could take on a significant portion of routine tasks, around 20% of human work capacity. Organizations that have already implemented RPA claim that robots could handle up to 52% of the workload, allowing human workers to focus on more meaningful activities.

Also Read: Best Practices in Online Curriculum Development for Higher Education

Conclusion

RPA eliminates inefficiencies by making repetitive work automatic while maintaining a virtual workforce that operates 24/7. This allows it to flexibly scale to meet demand, so tasks are done quickly and accurately.

It presents many advantages, such as improved speed, efficiency, and accuracy in overall performance. These efficiencies make it a vital requirement in any educational institution.

RPA can empower schools and universities to modernize their workflow, improve service quality, and streamline operations.

Hurix Digital can deliver low-cost RPA solutions using UI Path, Automation Anywhere, and Work Fusion tools. Talk to our experts to find out how we can assist you in automating the student acquisition process, reducing enormous manual efforts and costs.