General Questions

BusinessCAS™ is a Centralized Application Service (CAS™) that allows a student to apply to multiple graduate degree programs on one campus, or to multiple programs across multiple campuses, by submitting a single application for enrollment. The applicant is able to manage the entire process, including submission of supporting documentation, transcript(s) and recommendation requests, as well as answer additional unique questions asked by individual campuses and/or programs, including essays, personal statements, CVs/resumes or other documents of work samples. BusinessCAS is provided by Liaison International, the leader in application management for higher education. Liaison has powered Centralized Applications for nearly three decades and currently serves over 31,000 programs at more than 1,000 colleges and universities.

Yes, more than 31,000 programs at more than 1,000 colleges and university campuses leverage the same SaaS platform. Liaison manages more than 3,000,000 applications annually.

To optimize your use of BusinessCAS, it should serve as the primary application for your programs. Secondary or supplemental applications that are useful for your individual workflow can be maintained.

That said, there are significant benefits for the institution in using BusinessCAS as your primary application, including:

  • A single source for purview over all graduate program applications.
  • Customized application for each college and/or program.
  • Creation of dynamic application workflows in Liaison’s cutting-edge review and processing software.
  • Reduction of effort to process and package applications for review.
  • Reduction in applicant email and phone support.
  • Reduction in your application processing costs.
  • A single data source to manage for integration to your CRM, SIS and other systems.
  • Data for all graduate programs available from a single source.

Evidence from participating schools suggests programs that participate in a CAS may expect an overall increase in applications of 10% or more, but individual increases will likely vary.

Yes, BusinessCAS provides applicants the ability to research and apply to multiple programs. Research suggests, due to the competitive nature of admissions, 62% of prospective students already apply to multiple programs. In this regard, a CAS is a value-added service to the applicant and to the participating programs. However, applicants accessing BusinessCAS via your website, will be taken directly to your programs first. They would need to take an additional step to view other programs in BusinessCAS. 

Not necessarily. The $48 processing fee for BusinessCAS applications in many instances can be offset by eliminating the redundancies that exist in today’s current model, such as transcript request fees, mailing fees, etc. Surveys of applicants repeatedly show that the benefits of applying through a CAS justify any fees associated with this service. In order to ensure access, BusinessCAS will commit up to 5% of all application processing fees to an application fee waiver program in order to be certain no applicants are excluded.

Liaison encourages programs eligible to join affinity-based CASs to participate in the services provided by their professional associations. Liaison will work with institutions interested in BusinessCAS to determine which programs are eligible for affinity-based CASs and which are a fit for BusinessCAS. Your institution will have an overview and access to all data in BusinessCAS and in all other CASs on campus.

BusinessCAS may give you the opportunity to reallocate your resources. You will likely be able to move away from clerical and administrative tasks to more valuable endeavors such as recruitment, marketing and relationship building. We are aware of no situation where staff have been eliminated due to a CAS.

You can still collect your current application fees. However, many institutions find that the cost offset of outsourcing the application management and document processing functions included in a CAS offering (scanning, letters of recommendation, applicant support, etc.) create additional opportunity to reclaim budget, or FTE headcounts, who are freed up to focus on more impactful enrollment projects and initiatives. Liaison will collect your application fee with the processing fee and dispatch the payment to your university, or you can collect the application fee yourself.

BusinessCAS does not make any admissions decisions. BusinessCAS is simply a mechanism to gather the data that you need to make admissions decisions from applicants. BusinessCAS will provide data and documents in a ready-to-review format as well as tools like rubric scoring, faculty evaluations and others that can be used in the evaluation of the applications. The service will not interpret or evaluate the eligibility of any applicant. The selection and admission of all applicants is the sole prerogative of each college or department.

Liaison is committed to forming a partnership with participating campuses by providing planning, onboarding, training and oversight. A training program and a comprehensive customer service component will be significant parts of BusinessCAS for your campus.

BusinessCAS is a comprehensive web service for the application, and WebAdMIT is a SaaS for programs to use for application configuration and management of the application, evaluation and/or exporting data and PDFs. The service will provide data and training materials in formats that can be used by current/legacy systems already in place. The advent of web-based technology allows for the rapid transfer of data in universal formats. Some schools participating in other CASs upload the CAS information into current systems, while others use the WebAdMIT software provided by the application service to review applications, then transfer the final data to their SIS.

Yes, BusinessCAS is CRM agnostic. Liaison provides WebAdMIT to review and evaluate the application, as well as communicate with the applicant.. The program can choose to use it and transfer data to the CRM, simultaneously use WebAdMIT and the CRM for communication or bypass WebAdMIT entirely for review and communication with the applicant.  Our integration specialist will consult with you on the right decision for your programs.

BusinessCAS is configured so as soon as an applicant has expressed interest in a particular program, the institution will have the ability to contact the person. The institution can decide when to contact the applicant — right away to start recruiting, at some point during the application process and/or when waiting for the application to be completed.

BusinessCAS will not slow down your application process. In fact, most programs will realize an increase in speed to completion and packaging of the application for review as transcripts received by Liaison are validated, scanned (if print) and appended to the submitted application on the same day, then made available to enter your unique workflow process.

Data can be retrieved electronically on demand at any time. Additionally, exports can be scheduled to automatically pass data to your CRM service and/or SIS.

International students will apply in the same manner as students in the U.S. Liaison, the provider of BusinessCAS, has a partnership with World Education Services (WES) and ECE, the leaders in international credential evaluations, to manage/verify transcripts from foreign institutions; these evaluations can be brought into the application with the push of a button. The institution also has the choice to partner with another transcript evaluation provider or evaluate the transcript in-house. Evaluations, other than WES or ECE can be uploaded to the application

Technical Questions

All CRM, SIS and ERP systems tailored for institutions of higher education have the ability to import external applicant data via one or more configurable tools native to each system. BusinessCAS’s “Export Manager” tool provides agnostic, simple-to-configure exports of any subset of applicant data an ERP/SIS system needs, filtered by any criteria schools may choose to apply. These exports are available in numerous formats to simplify the import process for the school. The most common systems used by our university clients include BannerTM, DatatelTM, PeopleSoftTM and JenzabarTM, among others.

Because there is no standard, pre-packaged solution that can perfectly serve the nuances of all schools’ individual customized ERP implementations, each institution is best positioned to execute the final import of CAS data into their SIS or ERP system. That said, given the widespread presence of at least one CAS at most universities, it is very likely that a similar integration has already been done somewhere on your campus, and we can connect you with the professionals who have acquired this level of expertise. Liaison’s focus is to make exporting data from WebAdMIT seamless, with several user- and IT-friendly formats, so developing an individualized solution to integrate CAS data with your school’s ERP or SIS system should be relatively straightforward.

Liaison’s WebAdMIT admissions toolkit provides several utilities and data formats that can be used to import data into an SIS or ERP system. These tools give institutions the ability to:

  • Create files with only the fields required for use in their integration, rather than adapting to an obscure proprietary data format.
  • Sequence fields exactly as demanded by the ERP system’s tools.
  • Apply several commonly-used transformations (e.g., date formats) on data to simplify importing.
  • Limit the applicants included in the integration by any criteria required.
  • Run the export as frequently or infrequently as needed.
  • Output the files into numerous formats, such as comma-delimited, fixed-width and Excel.

Schedule exports to run at fixed times and access these exports for download via API. Institutions that have multiple schools or programs participating in a CAS can typically leverage expertise gained during the initial configuration of ERP or SIS tools, making subsequent integrations for additional programs hosted within a CAS much simpler.

There are two main options for performing the integration. The institution’s IT team, who is generally very knowledgeable about their SIS or ERP system, can use the data definitions in the Custom Export Layout file provided within WebAdMIT to configure the system’s tool to import the CAS data. Alternatively, a school can contract with a third-party vendor to handle the data import processes for them, as these generally only need to be configured once and undergo light maintenance in future years.

Our WebAdMIT support team has helped many universities in performing data integration between our systems and a variety of ERP or SIS systems, and they are more than happy to work with you and your IT staff. For institutions that would prefer a turnkey solution, Liaison International works with SSD Technology Partners/Axiom, who are specialists in performing Banner integrations of CAS data. If you are interested in retaining SSD’s services, please contact Lisa Detwiler at ldetwiler@ssdel.com.

Many schools and programs find the integration of CAS data with their ERP system to be straightforward, but Liaison’s team is available to provide support and guidance if necessary. If you have questions or want to share feedback, please contact our WebAdMIT Support Team at WebAdMITSupport@liaisonedu.com.

WebAdMIT’s application programming interface (API) will provide IT teams with the following capabilities:

  • Export Manager API — Run, download and process user-created data exports from the Export Manager programmatically, enabling true automation no longer dependent upon manually running export files.
  • Document Export Manager API — Automate batch downloads and indexing of applicant documents (such as the full application PDF) for university record keeping and integration.
  • Custom Fields API — Enable two-way integration with an SIS by automating the writing of data from an outside source back into WebAdMIT’s custom fields.
  • For more information, visit https://liaison-intl.github.io/.

Liaison powers over 40 unique CASs, each serving the application and enrollment needs of a specific educational discipline. The following is partial list of Liaison-powered CASs:

  • AADSAS/Dental Medicine
  • ArchCAS/Architecture
  • CASPA/Physician Assistant
  • EngineeringCAS/Engineering
  • OTCAS/Occupational Therapy
  • PharmCAS/Pharmacy
  • PSYCAS/Psychology
  • PTCAS/Physical Therapy
  • SocialWorkCAS/Social Work
  • SOPHAS/Public Health
  • VMCAS/Veterinary Medicine

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