How Molloy University partnered with CollegeVine to use AI for transcript processing, giving 835 hours back to its operations team

Molloy University's applications rose 68% between fall 2021 and fall 2025, and its entering class grew from roughly 540 students to 840. Its admissions team stayed exactly the same size: four people processing applications.

Building a reader set in Molloy's rules

"We needed a way to get through the chores, the GPA recalculations, the subject-by-subject math, so the team could keep the part that matters: reading the student," says Stephen Ostendorff, Ed.D., AVP for Admissions & Enrollment Technology at Molloy.

Molloy partnered with CollegeVine to build an AI transcript reader that takes on that math. A transcript PDF goes in, and the agent structures every course, credit, and grade, then recalculates GPA the way Molloy actually does it, on its own 100-point scale with subject-level calculations.

Calibrated against a class they'd already read

Before the reader touched a live application, Molloy ran an entire prior admissions cycle back through it, a class whose GPAs and merit awards the team had already set by hand. Comparing the two produced the flag set that gave the team confidence to launch.

"Perfect is the enemy of the good," Ostendorff says. "It's very easy to say a transcript reader has to do 100% of them. That was not my goal. We would have never launched."

The reader has since run more than 20,000 transcripts, agreeing with human-recalculated files more than 90% of the time.

Past the target in the first cycle

In its first cycle live, the reader read 68.5% of transcripts on its own, no human recalculation needed, and cut manually recalculated files by 55%. That gave the team back more than 835 staff hours, and let them render 14% more decisions year over year.

Expanding to every record a student brings

Molloy and CollegeVine are extending the same approach to the parts of a file that are still manual: ingesting WES and SpanTran evaluations for international credentials directly, identifying prerequisites and assessing language placement, posting AP, IB, and college coursework for advisors after deposit, and evaluating transfer credit.

Molloy isn't adding readers as volume grows. Extraction, recalculation, and data entry move to AI. The judgment stays with the people who know the students.