As your partner in an effective application process, we’re always responsive to your feedback. One recent piece of feedback we’ve received from several organizations is that Enrolltrack’s waitlist feature isn’t being used to its full potential. That’s why we are reworking that feature to become the new ‘pending’ status to alleviate any confusion and make it easier to use the system with maximum efficiency.

How it currently works

In the current workflow, several steps are finished before rosters are finalized.

1.) The prospective student creates an unsubmitted account, fills out all steps of the application, and submits it through the Enrolltrack portal.

2.) At this point, the application status is ‘incomplete’ until the sending school adds further information. Once the sending school has added all requested information, the application is marked as complete

3.) Now your organization reviews the application for eligibility and fills in all evaluation tools required to rank the student for an opportunity to be placed into a program.   4.) At this stage in the current workflow, you would mark the student as waitlisted so they are all ranked by your evaluation tools and ready for placement into the programs they applied to. All students are intended to be waitlisted.

In Enrolltrack, ‘waitlist’ has traditionally meant ‘awaiting placement,’ but we’ve become aware that the prevailing connotation of ‘waitlist’ is that it means a student is waiting for a spot to open up in programs that are already full. This causes more confusion for those that choose to share their student statuses with sending school users and teacher users.  

Though the most efficient choice after evaluation would be to click the ‘waitlist’ button so that the student joins the pool of other students who are ready to be placed, the understandable confusion around the term ‘waitlist’ has prevented many users from using this feature. Instead, they have been ranking and placing each student individually in a manual process. This requires additional time and can slow the placement process.

Why pending status makes sense

To solve this challenge, we created an enhancement that replaces the term ‘waitlist’ with ‘pending.’ There are several benefits to using this feature:

  • It shows all ranked students in one large group prior to placement, giving you a bigger-picture view of how each program is performing.
  • It allows you to then place groups of students in one click, rather than toggling between screens to place each student individually.
  • It simplifies the evaluation and placement process for both experienced users and those who are new to the Enrolltrack system.
  • It is more self-explanatory to Sending School users and Teacher users without need for additional training and explanation.

What happens to Waitlist status

Don’t worry, the waitlist status is still in the system and will not require any additional steps from you. Once all rosters are finalized and you are ready to inform students of their placement, you will enable the “Inform the Accepted” checkbox which will automatically replace all student that still have status pending to status waitlisted, as they will now truly will be on the waitlist for their programs.

If you’re ready to upgrade your current ‘waitlist’ feature to ‘pending,’ contact us today.

As always, we will continue innovating the enrollment process to enhance the experience for students, home schools, and of course—your organization. Thank you for being a valued partner in effective enrollment!