Enhancements to Banner Student Information System

University System of Georgia (USG)

USG sought to address two key issues currently challenging our nation and its dominant economic and technological position in the world: the need to expand the number of students pursuing careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and the rapidly rising costs of higher education.

Graduates with STEM degrees remain in high demand. More than 60 percent of job recruiters were most interested in hiring graduates with STEM degrees in 2017 while only 23 percent of graduates earned STEM degrees (source: Internet Collaborative Information Management Systems).

Meanwhile, the cost of higher education has increased more than 538 percent since 1985. In comparison, medical costs grew by 286 percent and the consumer price index by 121 percent. That means higher education is 4.5 times more expensive than it was 30 years ago (source: Bestvalueschools.com). Over the past 35 years, college tuition at public universities has nearly quadrupled to $9,139 in 2014 dollars. If car prices had grown as quickly as tuition over the same period, the average new car would cost more than $80,000 (source: The New York Times, “The Real Reason College Tuition Costs So Much,” April 4, 2015).

In response, USG implemented two enhancements to its Banner Student Information System (SIS). The first gives greater weight to approved STEM courses when determining a student’s eligibility for state-sponsored scholarships, and the second makes no-cost or low-cost eTextbooks more readily available to students through the SIS.

USG officials are already seeing positive results. The Affordable Learning Georgia initiative has saved students more than $31 million in textbook costs to date, and the initiative is poised to grow in coming years. Only two years ago, the USG was ranked No. 1 in the nation by OpenStax at Rice University, a national publisher, for saving students the most money through free eTextbooks.

USG’s efforts to make higher education more accessible to more students are certainly broader than these two enhancements to its central SIS, but they demonstrate technology’s critical role in achieving important goals.