End-to-end enrollment: from high school to graduate school with Albus

Tecnológico de Monterrey

Have you ever imagined what it takes to run a university? From high school and undergraduate to graduate programs, each line of business has its own academic requirements and technology demands to meet, a challenge that costs the university time, operational resources, and investment. The complexity of these lines of business comes to life in one specific process: course enrollment. Each line has its own rules for the course offering, for when the process opens, for access to sections, and for fee calculation and payment, and both the process and the system must enforce them for enrollment to succeed. Each also needs a specific user experience (UX), tailored to students' profiles and individual needs.

How can a university survive this complexity without compromising the student experience?

It's a question many universities ask themselves every day. In this article, we'll show you how Tecnológico de Monterrey (TEC) tackles this challenge with Albus, ensuring a smooth enrollment process that runs in parallel across PrepaTec, undergraduate, and graduate programs.

25 campuses. 91,000 students

"Prepa" prepares you for the future

In Mexico, the preparatoria (high school) model generally consists of three years of study after middle school, in which students prepare academically to enter higher education. The preparatoria curriculum usually includes core subjects such as math, science, and Spanish, along with electives such as languages, music, and leadership that let students explore different areas of interest. At the end of this level, students receive a diploma that lets them go on to higher education with a solid foundation of knowledge and skills. After three years of successfully running Albus for undergraduate enrollment, TEC decided to expand its reach by bringing this AI tool to PrepaTec students to improve their enrollment experience too. It was no easy challenge. The team started by adapting the existing undergraduate rules to the requirements of this new student population, covering specific needs such as:

• Building an intuitive, user-friendly interface designed specifically for high school students, and then integrating it with Banner to streamline billing.
• Enabling new rules for the language track so each student takes the right language and level for their program, with information on their current progress, the levels still ahead, and the flexibility to switch languages after their initial choice.
• Making sure every student had at least one complementary course in their course load, simplifying operations for TEC.
• Adjusting the credit rules to fit high school enrollment and letting students know the maximum allowed (30 credits for regular students and up to 26 credits for scholarship students).
• Customizing the tool's entire user experience with content, images, and videos tailored to their needs.

The power to adapt: Albus in graduate programs

Confident in Albus's ability to adapt to the specific requirements of each line of business, TEC also brought the tool to its graduate programs. It was enabled in March–April 2024 to welcome 500 incoming students across a range of master's, specialization, and doctoral programs.

Once again, enrollment meant adapting the business rules to the particulars of graduate programs and their students, but this time with a focus on...

1. Developing a new payment model that allowed a single upfront tuition payment and integrated it with TEC's internal platforms.
2. Making specific adjustments to the health insurance offering, making enrollment easier for students and management easier for the university.
3. Enforcing the credit and eligibility rules that graduate programs require.

The results of graduate enrollment confirm that Albus can adapt to any model and its particulars.

Next up, TEC is getting ready to enroll all 6,800 of its graduate students with Albus in July 2024.

The transformative impact of unified platforms

Unified, AI-powered platforms are transforming the education landscape by delivering operational efficiency, improving the student experience, and ensuring academic rules are applied consistently at every stage of a student's journey.

These are some of the benefits TEC has gained by running its three lines of business on Albus:

• Student experience: in a unified environment, students navigate every part of their academic life more smoothly and consistently, from enrollment to graduation.
• Operational efficiency: by managing multiple lines of business in a single tool, the university simplifies its operations and spends less time managing and maintaining different systems.
• Consistent policies and rules: with a single tool managing every line of business, the university can apply academic policies and rules consistently across all levels of education, reducing confusion and administrative errors.
• Centralized data analysis: by bringing every line of business into a single environment, the university has more complete and consistent data for analysis and reporting. This makes decision-making easier and helps identify trends that benefit every area of the institution.
• Flexibility and scalability: a centralized tool and a unified environment give the university the flexibility it needs to adapt to future changes, providing a solid foundation for growth and continuous innovation.