Putting an end to the paper chase

"The lines would extend across the hall and onto the street."

Ramona Brown, ES '97, worked in the Bursar's Office during her sophomore year. There she witnessed firsthand the frustrations of students placed on Bursar's hold. "It would get really hectic at the beginning of the year. People would have to wait on line for hours during peak periods," she said. "They'd bring crossword puzzles with them."

Any Yale student whose financial account is not fully paid a month before the beginning of any semester must cope with Bursar's hold; students on hold cannot register for courses. The only way to get off Bursar's hold is to clear up financial records at the Bursar's Office. Clearing up such records once required waiting in excruciatingly long lines. During the 1995-96 academic year, approximately 1,000 students were placed on Bursar's hold at the beginning of each semester. But this number later trailed off dramatically: at the beginning of the fall 1996 semester, approximately 300 students were on Bursar's hold.

Bursar's hold was once such a source of anguish for students that it sparked a protest on Cross Campus lawn in 1993. Today, students on Bursar's hold at the beginning of a semester face shorter lines and less hassle.

One of the greatest factors in this service improvement was the installation of a new computer system in the department of Student Financial and Administrative Services. Yale has declared a holy war on bureaucratic hassle; its main weapons are new administrative computer systems, groups of centralized computers that work together for a particular purpose. Improvements at the Bursar's Office represent one battle in this war. But like most wars at Yale, this is no revolution--changes are coming about at a ponderous pace.

Centralizing Yale's information

In the 1980s, Yale deferred maintenance on its buildings. The University similarly ignored its computer systems during this decade, prodding and tweaking them rather than replacing them when superior technology emerged. Individual administrative departments--including the Admissions Office, the Registrar's Office, and the Bursar's Office--purchased computer systems separately, without consulting one another.

When suburbs are constructed quickly, developers rarely plan the layout of the area's roads. Navigating the roads in such suburbs is difficult; large housing developments often have only one street linking them to the main highway, and roads in different developments can have maddeningly similar names. Administrative computer systems at Yale encountered similar problems. Department systems worked well on their own, but when they had to share information--as when the Registrar's Office had to receive the names and addresses of incoming freshmen from the Admissions Office--custom programs had to be written to allow the two computers to communicate. The process was long and inconvenient.

These technical problems had real effects on students' lives. The Bursar's hold difficulties resulted from separate financial aid and student account systems. One group of computers recorded the progress of financial aid awards; the other recorded credits and debits to student Bursar accounts. When scholarship money was awarded, it often took weeks for the information to make its way from financial aid computers to student account computers.

The era of deferred maintenance is over. Yale is renovating or has plans to renovate 100 of the 225 buildings on campus over the next 10 years, and the University is similarly updating its administrative systems. Every major system that has not been replaced in the last five years will be replaced in the next 10 years. New computer systems will be highly centralized--and students will reap the benefits.

The Banner years

Centralized administrative systems will combat bureaucracy in part by allowing different administrative departments to share information more easily. Nearly all administrative information relating to students will be housed on a Banner system, named for the Banner brand software it uses. Both the Financial Aid Office and the Bursar's Office are now using the Banner system; awards that took weeks to pass from the financial aid office to a student's Bursar account in 1994 are now credited instantly.

Director of Yale Information and Technology Services (ITS) Daniel Updegrove envisions these centralized computer systems tracking students from the moment they apply to Yale until long after they graduate. "The admissions office will use the Banner system to keep track of applicant information. The registrar will use the same system to keep track of students. And after students graduate, the Development Office will use their computer system to track alumni addresses and donations."

The information will not only be centralized--it will be accessible. Students can al-ready view their grades and financial information from a Web page that connects to a student system. According to Updegrove, in the future, students will be able to do even more via the Web: "We'd like to eliminate standing on line," Updegrove explained. "We hope that every form a student has to fill out in person on paper will soon be on the Web." Those who prefer not to use the Web will still have the option of using paper forms.

Within the next five years, the Yale Undergraduate Admissions Office will allow students to complete some parts of the application for admission online. Students will be able to complete entrance exams for Stafford Loans on the web, and their financial aid records will automatically be updated to indicate they have completed the interviews. According to Director of Student Financial and Administrative Services Ernie Huff, "Students operate on a 24-hour a day clock. We'd like to accomodate that schedule."

These centralized systems can also check information as it is entered into the system. With the online application for admission, for example, "if a student entered his address into the online form, and then puts the wrong zip code," Huff explained, "the system would be able to warn them about it."

With less information entry and verification required, many clerical workers may find their workload lessened. The 1996 union contracts, however, make laying off Local 34 workers extraordinarily difficult. According to Vice President of Finance and Administration Joseph Mullinix, clerical workers will "either be deployed to do other work in their department, or moved to another department."

Yale lags

Yale is starting its modernization efforts a country-mile behind many other universities. Brigham Young University, for example, has been allowing students to register for courses via touch-tone phone since the 1970s and via the Web since last year, while the University of Pennsylvania has been allowing students to register via phone since the late 1980s and via the Web since the mid '90s.

According to Huff, Yale's tardiness can be attributed in large part to the decentralized nature of the University; there are 12 academic schools, and except for the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the undergraduate College, each is relatively small. "The small schools tended to deal with these things manually," Huff said, "because they had the personnel to do so." Outdated systems that required extensive manual intervention were therefore not a problem.

Administrative issues have further delayed these technological improvements from becoming a reality. To some degree, these systems are victims of the bureaucracy they are trying to allay. For example, although all the technology is in place for online course registration, it will not be available until the Yale College Dean's Office, residential college Deans, and departments' Directors of Undergraduate Studies decide how to integrate the current advising process with Yale's technology.

In order to take advantage of University facilities now, students often need many cards: an identification card, an RIS laser printing card, a library copy machine card, a parking garage access card, a Yale Dining Hall debit card for Yale vending machines--the list goes on. While the Administration plans to integrate all of these cards into the current Yale identification card, Updegrove concedes that there "is no explicit plan underway yet to make this a reality."

The online portion of the undergraduate application for admission will be functional by the end of this year, but Dean of Admissions Richard Shaw does not believe the Admissions Office will allow applicants to use it for at least two years. "We will move forward with the technology," he explained, "but we want to do it right, so we're doing a great deal of assessment."

Enhanced security

One element of online admissions applications that Shaw wishes to examine is security. "We want to be sure this form is completely secure before we proceed," he explained. Highly centralized and sensitive information about students demands high levels of security.

According to Andrew Newman, a senior level systems programmer with technology and planning at Yale ITS, "The Banner system is substantially more secure than the Pantheon." Last semester, hackers broke into the Pantheon using a packet sniffer to eavesdrop on users as they logged into the email server, hence learning their login names and passwords.

Using this same method to break into the Banner system would be extraordinarily difficult. According to Newman, "not that many" people in the world could break into the Banner system.

Student perception of the system's security is as important as the actual security. "If people don't think it's secure, they won't use it," Newman said. Claims of security breaches are thoroughly investigated; so far no real problems have arisen with new student systems.

Administrative computer systems exert a quiet power over Yale. Most people will never see a Banner system, or an Oracle database, but these machines have the power to alter student life at Yale: anyone who has ever stood on line at the Bursar's Office can understand this. But change will come slowly. Anyone who used an administrative system purchased in the '80s can understand why that should be.

Graphics by David A. Moore.

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