Ending the Paper Trail
As paper files become increasingly rare at many institutions, it’s not surprising that international admission offices are finding themselves dealing more and more with digital documents. While the shift away from hard copies may not always be easy, digitization offers significant benefits to both admission offices and prospective students.
“As an admissions officer I can say the greatest advantage of digitizing credentials is efficiency for both students and university admission staff,” says Mihaela Ifrim, international student services coordinator at Southwestern Oklahoma State University and a former international student. “Students can quickly and inexpensively upload unofficial transcripts to admission portals or have their digital official transcripts sent to many universities.”
In addition to boosting efficiency, making the initial investment and transitioning to digital documents can yield other benefits for institutions and their students, ensuring data portability and student credential ownership, improving data privacy, and preventing fraud.
The Rise of Digitization
Digital documents have been the norm for a while in some sectors, including banking. Due to the need to standardize banking information across borders, as well as laws to prevent money laundering, financial institutions now depend on digital documents for their records. “We in international education can learn a lot from that,” says Cheryl DarrupBoychuck, CEO of Funds Validator, a platform that allows students and their financial sponsors to provide digital banking data to universities and other institutions. “Each jurisdiction has its own nuances, but they still need to communicate across borders in a standardized way.”
As with many changes
