Admissions

Digitalising admissions in Morocco: where to start

A Moroccan institution receives its applications from several cities, in the middle of results season, often from a parent rather than the applicant. The project does not start with software. It starts with a map.

9 September 20266 min readBy the GEERD team

The question almost always arrives in the same order: which software should we buy. That is the second question. The first one is where, in the campaign you have just finished, an application stopped moving, and how many days it stayed there.

The Moroccan context makes that question very concrete. Files arrive from several cities, in the weeks after the baccalaureate results, and rarely all at once: a transcript photographed in the evening, an ID card scanned crooked, a certificate that will come “next week”. The first message usually arrives on WhatsApp, and usually from a parent. While you are assessing the file, the same family has lodged two or three others elsewhere.

What “digitalising” means here

Most admissions offices are already digital, in the sense that the paper is gone: form online, documents by email, follow-up in a shared spreadsheet. What is missing is not one more screen, it is a place where the state of a file is true without anyone having to narrate it.

The test takes a minute: take a name from the current campaign and ask three people where the file stands, without opening anything. If the three answers differ, or if none is possible before opening two tools and an inbox, the state of the file lives nowhere.

The four moments an application stops

None of them is a breakdown. All four can be dated, file by file, in what you already have.

The first message

A form filled in at eleven at night, a WhatsApp message on a Saturday. The reply goes out on Monday, sometimes Tuesday. The applicant, meanwhile, wrote to three schools the same evening. Plot your first-reply times by day of the week: the curve speaks for itself.

The missing document

An incomplete file does not announce itself. It stays as it is until somebody reopens it. The question to ask is not how many files are incomplete, but how many days they have been incomplete, and whether the applicant was told, by whom, and when.

The gap between decision and letter

The panel decided in the meeting. The written answer goes out later, because someone has to go back to the list, draft, check the addresses. In between, the applicant calls. It is the only delay in the campaign that depends on nobody but you.

The application fee

Bank transfer, cheque, a trip to the front desk: every step adds a day, and a day is an opportunity to compare. A card payment secured to banking-industry standards, from the applicant’s own space, closes the act at the moment the family decided on it.

Where to start, in order

The first two require no purchase. The next two assume a tool: they come afterwards.

01Write down the real journey
One page: the stages in order, who acts at each of them, and what triggers the move to the next. Many teams discover at that moment that two programmes do not follow the same journey, and that nobody had ever written it down.
02Date the stops, then fix one
Take thirty files and note the dates: enquiry received, first reply, file complete, decision, answer sent, fee paid. The table fills in one morning, and it points at one moment heavier than the rest. Handle that one. A project that starts by digitalising everything ends in configuration, usually during the next campaign.
03Make the file’s state visible to the applicant
A space where they see what has arrived, what is missing and what has been approved. Every question they can answer for themselves is a question that never reaches your team, and a family that does not have to choose between waiting and calling again.
04Decide what should go out on its own
An acknowledgement, an interview reminder, a notice when the stage changes, a receipt for a payment: by email, on WhatsApp or in the app, on the channels families here actually read. And continuity towards the registry is prepared at the same moment, during set-up, not the night before term starts.

The mistakes that keep coming back

Three come back more often than the rest. Trying to handle everything in one season, which guarantees no stage is finished. Picking a general-purpose tool because it is well known: it is not a bad tool, it is built for a different shape of work, and the gap is paid in configuration and then in maintenance. And forgetting the team: a tool the admissions officer works around on a Tuesday morning does not exist.

A tool built for admissions (BrightStep, in our case) arrives with the stage, the document, the interview and the payment as objects rather than as fields to create. That is a real gain, and it comes after the map. Not before.

What you can do this week

Five counts, no purchase, one morning. They are enough to know where to start.

Take ten files from the last campaign and note the date of the first reply to each.
Ask two people where the same applicant stands, without opening anything, and compare the answers.
Count the files waiting on a document today, and how many days they have been waiting.
Measure the number of days between the panel’s decision and the written answer sent to the applicant.
List what enrolment will ask again of an admitted student whose information admissions already holds.

What to take away

Digitalising admissions does not start with software. It starts with the precise moment an application stops moving, and with the decision to fix one of those moments this season. The rest falls into place in that order, and only in that order.

We will not tell you what that moment costs you: you have the files and the dates, we do not. What we know how to do is find it with you, in half a day, and leave you to decide whether it is worth settling before the next intake.