In his old job, Christopher Redd saw a lot of frustrated people. When students and alumni here at Virginia Commonwealth University needed official transcripts, they came to the office of records and registration, where he worked. Mr. Redd could get them their transcripts. He could not, however, take their money. Instead he sent them to the cashier’s office, several blocks away.
That kind of scenario—and the resulting annoyance—is what the university’s Student Services Center, which opened about two years ago, is meant to prevent. The center was designed as a “one-stop shop,” a model that more colleges have adopted over the years, in which several functions are combined, and frontline staff can help students with any of them.
At Virginia Commonwealth, the center brings together the offices of records and registration, student accounts, and financial aid. A staff of “generalists,” including Mr. Redd, sits behind a counter in the spacious lobby of Grace E. Harris Hall, which used to house the school of business. Happily for Mr. Redd, the cashier’s office is now just across the lobby, a stone’s throw from his desk.
Dividing the registration, bursar, and financial-aid functions of a university into discrete units might make sense to staff but not to students. And if the point is to help students, shouldn’t services be organized with their needs—not the habits of the institution—in mind? That’s what Michael Flanigan and Delores Taylor, the two administrators behind the creation of Virginia Commonwealth’s center, concluded.
Mr. Flanigan and Ms. Taylor were far from the first college administrators to think this way. The University of Minnesota was an early adopter of the one-stop model.
Julie A. Selander, interim director of Minnesota’s one-stop student services and university veteran services, says other colleges have good reason to pursue this format: “The silo way of doing things creates that runaround for students, and students are frustrated.” The center, Ms. Selander says, has been one force behind improvements in Minnesota’s student retention.
At Virginia Commonwealth’s one-stop, a student doesn’t have to understand which questions about paying for college are handled by financial aid and which are handled by student accounts. The student goes to one place, the center’s lobby, and talks to one person, a generalist. Nearly all of the center’s generalists were moved over from frontline positions in the three free-standing offices.
One-stops are not a guaranteed formula for success. Combining customer-service staffs might mean no one’s in the wrong line, but it could also make that line terribly long, causing just the sort of frustration that the centers were designed to eliminate, says Kathy Kurz, vice president of the higher-education-consulting firm Scannell & Kurz. And, she says, the more units a center combines, the more difficult it is to ensure that staff are up to date on everything.
A one-stop shop might make perfect sense, Ms. Kurz says, but only once a college has identified a problem and rejected other solutions. Combining physical departments can be a headache, she says—and it may not be necessary, given how many services students access online.
Students at Virginia Commonwealth do complete most of their business with the university online. But their in-person experience still matters, says William Morley, the center’s manager. Besides, he says, with more than 30,000 students, the university is bound to have some whose situations are too complex or unusual for a cookie-cutter solution.
Guidance and Self-Reliance
On a rainy November day, Mr. Redd sits in a tall chair designed to place him at eye level with a student standing on the other side of his desk. The generalists’ desks are lined up in a row at the front counter. Behind them are the back offices; before them is the lobby, decorated in a colorful, modern style. As students talk with staff members, they are separated from one another by low walls meant to enhance privacy. A white-noise generator humming in the background also helps keep conversations confidential.
It’s a quiet day at the center. The university has recently moved to a new system that prevents students from registering for classes if they have not taken the prerequisites. Administrators thought that the change could make for a busy time at the center if students ran into problems, but the transition seems to have gone smoothly: Throughout the day, there are never more than a handful of students waiting in line.
Next to the line is a self-service area, where students can take care of nearly anything pertaining to registration or paying online, by themselves. But that doesn’t mean they all will. Some require a lot of hand-holding, the generalists say, for even the most basic of tasks.
Mr. Redd, who has worked at the university for 11 years, believes this attitude is generational. When his father dropped him off at college, he recalls, he gave him a couple of twenties and told him to do well. That was that. Today, Mr. Redd says, many students rely on their parents long after they arrive on campus.
He and his colleagues see helping such students become more independent as part of their job. Mr. Redd will walk a student through a simple task, but he’ll also explain how she can do it for herself the next time. The center’s setup helps him do this. Each generalist has two computer monitors, so that one can be turned to face the student to show her what the generalist has dragged over from his screen.
Not only are students less self-reliant than they used to be, Mr. Redd says, but they are also part of a culture that has made them less patient. “Students now, they want it when they want it,” he says.
When David Abebrese, a sophomore chemistry major, comes up to the counter to ask for two transcripts that he needs in a hurry, Mr. Redd decides to get them right away, fast-tracking a process that normally takes two or three days.
He walks to the back-office portion of the center, to the records and registration area. Because he came from registration, he says, he can seal the official transcripts himself, making it easier for the back-office staff to rush a request for him once in a while.
Mr. Abebrese is unimpressed. He needs the transcripts on the spot, to apply for a scholarship and renew his car insurance. In the information age, he says, that should be expected.
As the price of college has risen, so have students’ expectations of the service they will experience, says Ms. Taylor, one of the administrators who advocated for the one-stop model at Virginia Commonwealth.
Nonprofit higher education can be hesitant to call students “customers.” Ms. Taylor, associate vice provost for enrollment services, is not. Students are more than customers to a university, but they are its customers nonetheless, she says.
Customer Service
Still, on a university campus, the customer isn’t always right. Students aren’t simply handed degrees in exchange for their tuition, and sometimes they get answers they don’t like.
Students can do many things at the center, but they can’t do everything. When one comes with a question about being readmitted after a suspension, Sandra F. Davis, one of the generalists, sends him to the admissions office, which is in another building.
Sometimes students get angry about being directed elsewhere. When a woman who needs to settle a tuition bill is told that the center can’t handle payment once a bill is in collections, she is visibly upset, and vocal about it, too. “We do get some people here who determine we’re going to take care of situations we can’t,” Ms. Davis observes as she watches her colleagues talk with the woman.
Mr. Morley, the manager, comes over to help the staff respond to the upset woman. They offer to call the collections office for her, but she is not having it. Eventually Mr. Morley persuades the woman, who did not want to be named, to let him walk her to the collections department, several blocks away. It is raining steadily, and she is none too pleased. But Mr. Morley remains calm and diplomatic. Situations like this one are rare, he tells a reporter.
The university does try to make clear what the center can and cannot do, says Mr. Flanigan, who managed the creation of the center and helps oversee its operations. But the lingering expectation that the staff can do everything, he says, is “one of the perils of setting yourself up as a one-stop center.”
The generalists seem to like the one-stop model and believe it is better for students. Students’ opinions, however, are mixed. In Mr. Flanigan’s experience, new students love the center, while upperclassmen are sometimes annoyed that they can’t go directly to see someone from a specific office, as they could in the past.
Some students who spoke with a reporter when they came by the center said they liked being able to do all of their university business in one location, and others said they’d prefer separate offices where they could talk to a specialized staff person. But on the whole, students did not express strong opinions. Perhaps that is to be expected. Students must register for classes and pay for them, but neither action is the cornerstone of the college experience.
If Virginia Commonwealth students don’t have to spend a lot of time thinking about how they complete those tasks, that may be the surest sign that the center is a success.