Widener University runs on more than 100 systems. Transcripts, degree audits, transfer credit, and course sections all live in different places, often with different names for the same thing.
Untangling the data before the agents could work
Widener's partnership with CollegeVine started with two agents: Todd for graduate recruitment, and Taylor for the campus one-stop. Getting them right meant confronting what was underneath them.
"We have 100 plus systems at our campus, resulting in a highly decentralized organization," said Joseph Howard, Ed.D., VP for Enrollment and Technology at Widener University. "Our data fragmentation and data hygiene issues are real and pervasive."
For the summer catch-up plan, CollegeVine focused on one system: the student information system holding Widener's transcripts, degree audits, transfer credit, and course data. CollegeVine normalized those records into one shared structure and layered in Widener's own rules: the exact course sequences, prerequisites, and corequisites each major requires. Everything resolves into four things the system can reason about: a person, a course, a program, a requirement.
From a progress report to a plan
That common structure turned a process that used to take months, reconciling what a degree requires against what a student has actually completed, into one that takes minutes.
For every student, the system checked three things: do they still need this course, can they actually take it, and can they register for it right now. Only students who cleared all three got a recommendation.
For campuses where the data already has the answer
The ingestion work only has to happen once. Next summer, the same system runs across Widener's entire undergraduate population, and the same data layer will support curricular complexity scoring, flags for course combinations students struggle with, and self-serve insights for deans.
"Aside from practices that simply identify at-risk students, we've started to think more systematically and structurally," Howard said. "Where are the institutional roadblocks that hamper student progress? We're excited to see how AI might help illuminate such challenges."
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