Liaison’s history with product and service offerings like CAS and Living Profile, in alignment with NASH’s mission, has been focused on equitable student success. Liaison’s deep experience and technical expertise has been at the forefront of providing seamless admissions application and enrollment success, serving over 70 discipline-based and white-labeled CASs, used by more than 1,200 institutions nationally. Currently, Liaison has products and services in place within 100% of NASH member systems. This success has led to four national system relationships starting with one of the largest systems in the country – the California State University (CSU) system. With a student-focused application and system-specific enhancements, Montana and Hawai'i systems have joined CSU in leading the way to greater student access and mobility.

The systemwide Liaison Centralized Application Service (CAS) is a highly configurable platform that allows for flexible configuration based on each public higher education system's unique needs, specifications, branding, data protocols, integration, and advanced analytics. The student-friendly architecture allows for deeper insight across the system with adaptability to current enrollment trends as well as unique state- and systemwide challenges.

Additionally, campuses achieve significant efficiencies with a CAS by curating services inside one application, including the cost saving opportunity to reduce requirements on campus and a competitive speed to decision. As a result, the benefit of “systemness” allows for shared services, shared innovation, and shared enhancements within systems and across the entire NASH Enrollment Intelligence (EI) network due to the capabilities developed within the current architecture.

The NASH Network allows for the power of “systemness” by coordinating all systemwide CAS instances throughout the nation. As a result, shared architecture, multitenant solutions, deep student longitudinal data analytics, and a standardized approach to college and workforce matriculation exist. Additionally, each system is able to provide its unique presence in its own highly configurable CAS for its constituents.

Systems that are currently utilizing a CAS solution have benefited by providing a standard application experience across the campuses in their system, generating significant efficiencies in the admissions process, freeing up staff time and resources to focus on enhanced services to students and families, and providing a singular set of criteria and a shared experience with everything from timelines and fees to high school guidance counselor training that apply to all schools. NASH Network provides the opportunity to share across systems development, customizations, and enhancements. As has been seen with the other CAS system implementations, the CAS application process is only the first step in providing the foundation for growing service enhancements that range from Direct Admissions and the Transfer Planner to highly specific communications to students and parents for admissions, and financial literacy, all in support of expanded system initiatives that provide greater student engagement for higher education and workforce development.

As a member of the NASH Network, systems will benefit in several ways:

A Comprehensive Solution to Reach Greater and Diverse Applicant Pools

• Campuses utilizing the CAS platform realize an increase in application volumes starting as early as the first year.
• CAS provides a comprehensive, connected solution throughout the student academic pathway from high school to community college to undergraduate and graduate programs and finally to the workforce. Through this pathway, students are continually nurtured to remain connected to the state System and get ultimately employed within the state.
• CAS provides a centralized access point for students, making it easier to apply to multiple campuses and/or programs, while offering those programs a decentralized ability to ask unique questions and brand their individual identities.
• Additionally, as a NASH Network member, a System will gain access to the growing Living Profile to gain visibility into a national pool of potential applicants. The Living Profile is a platform that allows applicants to create a life-long, continually updated profile and to define long-term academic and career goals, and allow them to be visible to State Systems and eventually employers.

Cost Savings and Administrative Efficiencies

• Systems and individual campuses see day-to-day cost savings due to improvements in speed to decision for applicants since all front-end applications processes are automated.
• Systems and individual campuses will realize a potential reduction in staff costs on campus for application processing and support, offering more time to focus on student yield and the personalized support of applicants and their families.
• Systems and campuses experience access and communication capability to potential applicants interested in a campus, campuses, or the system that previously did not exist.

Access to a SYSTEMNESS Architecture

• In the truest sense of systemness, as we have seen with current systems, systems in the NASH Network will share best practices as enhancements to the baseline CAS are automatically shared with all other systems.
• A system will not only be able to see its own student mobility and longitudinal data but will be able to compare that to the larger NASH Network data. This can be used for comparison, deeper reporting, and improved analytics through anonymized cohort reporting. Where applicable and approved, campus-to-campus comparisons can be shared within the system.

Support services included with CAS for systems include the collection of transcripts, letters of recommendation, and other artifacts that might be required for submission. They are gathered and automatically attached to a student’s completed application and available for review. Additionally, Liaison handles student support in the form of phone, email, and live chat, reducing the support burden on campus throughout the year, and more importantly, at critical peak times near deadlines.

Optional additional services are also available with Liaison. Through this partnership, NASH members will have the opportunity to develop a systemwide CAS solution that is highly configurable at the system level, as well as at individual campus levels to meet their needs. Like the systems already using a CAS solution, Liaison will partner with you to consult, enhance, and develop comprehensive enrollment solutions that meet your requirements. Liaison offers a wide set of services and products, ranging from lead delivery and marketing services to CRMs and prescriptive and predictive analytics – these solutions are already deployed on hundreds of campuses throughout the nation.

Yes. Liaison would be happy to demonstrate the CAS solution as well as facilitate a connection with a system already using the Liaison CAS to learn about their experience. There are several already live and in production, including Cal State Apply, Apply Montana, and the University of Hawai’i System.

Yes. In fact, a CAS solution allows for those offices and staff to be freed to focus on their core strengths without distraction of time-consuming application system maintenance, enhancements, and other tasks. CAS also supports permissioned access to data, keeping each campus from seeing, accessing, or communicating with another campus’s applicants. This results in greater efficiency and savings of valuable resources. While sharing a common solution across a system, each institution will still maintain the ability to independently implement its own enrollment management initiatives that align with its own branding, mission, and goals, while benefiting from the systemwide shared knowledge and assistance a system CAS provides.

CAS interfaces with more than 25 existing SISs, CRMs, vendors of tests, transcripts, and letters of recommendation. At the same time, it provides real-time support for all applicants by answering any questions they have related to their college application journeys. The CAS and associated services are designed technically and strategically to provide a state-of-the-art user experience and serve as a gateway to innovation. The CAS application is currently used by over 40,000 programs across the higher education landscape with high Net Promoter Scores (NPS) – a measure of overall experience satisfaction and likelihood to recommend the service.

As a highly configurable platform, CAS is designed as an enterprise-based application system that can accommodate the inherent application data as well as any supporting data elements and document requests from internal and/or third-party applications.

Yes. This function is already in production at the CSU. Additionally, Liaison is exploring the implementation of this solution with other systems.