Venkat Srinivasan
Managing Director - Higher Education @ Wipro Limited
Venkat has over 25 years’ experience with strategy, technology and operations of the education industry. Venkat's areas of interest and expertise include higher education management, student retention and digital technology solutions for connected student experience. Venkat has published several thought leadership point of views and has been a speaker at industry events.
In his current role, he will be responsible for spearheading the growth of the Education vertical for Wipro and pursuing strategic business development opportunities in the US market and help scale the Education portfolio.
Previously Venkat was leading Cognizant’s foray into the higher education domain. He was responsible for positioning Cognizant as the pre-imminent provider of technology solutions and services to the education industry and enabling alliances and partnerships with product companies in the industry. Prior to Cognizant, Venkat managed NIIT's enterprise learning technology and services business for the Education and publishing industry verticals in US & Europe.
The Story
Challenges in college admissions process
Incredibly inefficient, ineffective, expensive. Universities recruit far and wide to expand their pool of applicants in the hope of finding that perfect student.
The Why
Holistic admissions where every aspect of the student is considered using data driven, unbiased view is nearly ubiquitous.
From the Institution perspective - think 'Smart" and answer the following questions:
1.How do we increase the number of applicants and acceptances without compromising the quality of the process and lower costs? Broaden the funnel; process efficiency and balance quality with quantity of output
What's Next
Future of Enrollment - Smart Admissions
Digitize documents, classify and segment, score and predict student overall fitment to program and university
Benchmark students based on personality survey to identify ideal and diverse students
Rule based criteria to score potential students
Measuring qualities that aren’t quantifiable (extracurricular activities, essays, and recommendations) converted to score based value and used for comparison using text mining, sentiment analysis, deep learning
Future State / Goals of Smart Admissions
Increase transparency in the admission process
Reduce bias
Data driven decisions
Minimal human oversight with focus on process driven approach
Improving quality of students along with increase in quantity of
Using AI to identify ideal student that embodies the university value and mission
Call to Action
Create a plan for 30-60-90 day plan with incremental approaches to making your admission process smart
Review current value chain for admission and remove inefficiency using automation
Using current data and historical data to build patterns and models
Gaps analysis – focus on rapid innovation
Building predictive models for admissions, marketing yield, acceptance rates and other measures