George Mason University uses Salesforce to track student data across admissions and services, aiming to meet diverse students where they are. The university built a single source of truth for enrollment and engagement, with concrete goals to grow applications and improve completion rates.
Sometimes higher ed can be known for being a bit slow to change, but not George Mason.
Old higher ed is ultra selective.
The cost of higher education has been increasing dramatically over the last few decades.
Here at George Mason University, we pride ourselves on attracting students to higher education who would be excluded elsewhere and producing the same rates of success with those students as our more selective counterparts.
Diversity is our strength at Mason, but it also means that our students come with a a lot of different life experiences. So we need to be able to meet students where they are.
We had to become more efficient. We had to provide mask customization to campus to tailor services to students needs. And we didn't have the proper technology in place to do that. We needed a single source of truth to actually communicate and engage with students at all levels.
Student experience redesign was really about us recalibrating our services, our communication with students to give them what they need to reach their full potential.
We simply set out to identify what is the ideal modern student experience.
This partnership with Salesforce allows us an opportunity to walk right alongside students.
We're able to have a 360 degree view of a student engaging with our campus.
Having that kind of context, coming into a conversation with a student always helps us to be better connected with who our students are.
When you think about the student first, decisions and innovation kind of cascade around that. We started in undergraduate admissions, we then expanded that to graduate admissions. We then expanded into our orientation and our Mason Student Services Center.
Salesforce has definitely made us more competitive because it's put us in a position to take ownership of our data and to be able to use it more strategically.
We were getting about 13.8% of all of Virginia high school graduates applying to Mason a few years ago. It's almost 15% now. So we're going to grow from 40 to 45,000. We're going to have to be able to accommodate more students, we're going to have to be able to attract more students and then we're going to have to make those students bit as successful. And we think we have a chance of achieving that when the technology binds all of these great Mason faculty and staff together in a unified effort. All of the professionals on this campus believe that college matters and it is actually the gateway to a better life.
As a first generation low income college student. It's a big part of what I do and why I chose to work at a school like George Mason.
When we see students toss those green mortar boards up into the sky after graduation, it is truly a triumph.
I want them to see themselves as agents of change, and I want to feel like we've given them the tools to do that.
