Admission Source on Admissions Candidate Detail

Overview

Admission Source is a field to track the origin of a specific Admission Candidate. In a number of cases, this field populates automatically. In other cases, Admission Staff may need to update the Admission Source manually.

Admission Source Details

The primary place Admission Staff will see the Admission Source is the Candidate Detail that can be seen at right. The field can also be seen and updated on the Person Admission detail screen. And lastly, the field exists for query purposes in the person admission, and candidate query templates. The field itself is a database specific drop down so while there is a default list, the list can be changed if needed.

The Admission Source supports the following sources by default:

• VC Online Inquiry
• VC Online Application
• Admission Lead Import
• SSAT
• Ravenna
• Gateway to Prep
• NAIS
• TABS
• School Fair
• Phone/In-Person
• Other

In each of the following cases, the field is automatically set on the Person Admission record.

• Any candidates entered via the Admissions Leads Importer receive the Admission Lead Import source
• SSAT Applicants and Registration Applicants both automatically receive the SSAT source
• Inquiries captured via the Veracross Online Inquiry receive the VC Online Inquiry source
• Applications captured via the Veracross Online Application receive the VC Online Application source
• Applicants imported via Ravenna integration receive the the Ravenna source

Note that if a source is already set on a person admission record, Veracross will not overwrite the source with a newer source. If a specific Admission Candidate should receive a newer source, the Admission staff member should pull up the Person Admission record and update the source. The most likely case for needing to update the Admission Source would be if the application and inquiry are received from different sources.

Using this feature

A common configuration and usage of this feature might look like this.

For a Veracross client that uses the Veracross online admissions process, import automation with SSAT, and additionally accepts offline “paper” applications, they can expect the following configuration:

• An online inquiry for John Doe through Veracross will automatically set Admission Source appropriately.
  • A subsequent completion of the Application online will not update Admission Source, because the field is only updated from a value of “None Specified”
  • Schools can easily manually update the Admission Source field to an application-specific value if they wish to
• An SSAT application for Jane Smith is automatically imported, and Jane Smith was NOT previously in Veracross. This will automatically set “Admission Source” as an SSAT source
• An SSAT application for Susie Sampson is automatically imported, and Susie WAS previously in Veracross, because she had previously applied for a prior year. This will automatically set “Admission Source” for the new admission year to match the Admission Source of the original record for Susie Sampson.
  • This is because the automatic setting of Admission Source is based on the original data source of the person record.
  • Schools can easily manually update the new admission record’s Admission Source to an SSAT value
• An offline paper application for a Jack Aaronson, a person not previously in Veracross, is added manually. Admission Source will not be automatically updated, because automatic updates are not supported for manually-entered people or applications.
  • Schools can easily manually update the new admission record’s Admission Source to an appropriate value.

As illustrated through the above examples:

• Admission Source is automatically set in certain circumstances in order to inform admissions staff of the origination of an admissions record
• Admission Source allows for tracking not only the source of Applications, but in fact it will be automatically set most commonly for Inquiries, and not subsequently updated automatically. For those schools that desire to track the source of Applications specifically, with this feature they have a configured dropdown-menu field to use.
•  The dropdown-menu values for Admission Source can be configured to be school-specific. For the schools that expect to manually update this field for applications, they can have their own set of dropdown-values to manually update whenever as they wish.
  • Additional automation for new values may be considered, but some schools may find that the main value of this new feature is the updateable dropdown-menu.

Admission Source System Groups

Admission Source has been used to group Candidates by Source. From any Find Groups query, Candidates by Admission Source groups exist within the Admissions System Group category.