TechEDge | California Community Colleges

eTranscript Success Story: CSU, Sacramento

Last Updated on Thursday, 12 August 2010 Written by Jen Gednalske Tuesday, 27 April 2010

Terry Cataline, of the Office of the University Registrar at California State University, Sacramento (CSUS), had been anticipating the arrival of a universal electronic transcript system for nearly 15 years.

Formerly a counselor and career planning instructor at two California Community Colleges (CCC), Santa Rosa Community College and Merced Community College, Cataline had experienced the need for a system that would allow counselors more efficient access to new transfer students records.

“Even at the community college level, many students have previous course work from other institutions that require counselors to spend significant time during the students counseling session to determine their previous course equivalency to the course requirements at the new school,” Cataline said.

“Many times I spent 25 of the 30 minutes I had with students just trying to determine which courses they had already taken that matched the courses at our school. eTranscript California has been valuable in allowing the degree audit process to be more efficient and allows counselors more time to help students plan their future schedules.”

Three-fourths of incoming students in the CSU system have come from the CCC. CSUS has been the largest volume user of eTranscript California in the state. The time needed for processing all of the transcripts for incoming students has been significantly reduced for the university.

Because eTranscript California was designed to seamlessly flow into PeopleSoft—the records management system used by the 23 CSU campuses—the university system now has a universal way to receive and process large volumes of transcripts in a much shorted period of time.

For the transfer credit evaluation process, all student credits need to be entered in the computer. Previously this was done either manually or using their former Optical Character Recognition (OCR) system. The process could take up to a week for the same amount of transcripts that Cataline can now process in 15 to 20 minutes using eTranscript California.

Given the state of the economy in California, Cataline recognizes the significance in reducing the number of hours spent processing transcripts. “Because of budget cuts, we have had to significantly reduce our admissions cycle at the CSU,” Cataline said. "In a year at CSUS we may receive about 20,000 transcripts and out of those, we may only take about 3,700 students. We need to be able to process those transcripts in a much shorter period.”

Cataline credits Tim Calhoon, Director of the CCC Technology Center, and Catherine McKenzie, director of the Telecommunications and Technology Unit for the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office (CCCO), for really helping to develop the project in a way that would be helpful to schools system in general.

“The economy of scale, the ability for eTranscript California to be expanded throughout the state was one of its most appealing attributes,” Cataline said. “eTranscript California works for entire systems, not just individual schools.”

Cataline would eventually like to see high schools also using eTranscript California. “Even though only about one-fourth of our students come to the CSU directly from the high schools, there is the same efficiency issue,” Cataline said. “As more and more institutions begin using eTranscript California, the savings to tax payers will be significant.”<>

For more information on eTranscript California, please visit: http://etranscriptca.org.

Jen Gednalske is a CCC Technology Center and California Virtual Campus Project Manager
and a TechEDge Editor.