Liaison News

Liaison Integrates GMAC’s Common Letter of Recommendation into BusinessCAS™ and Enhances the Reviewer Experience

Dec 4, 2018

Liaison’s Centralized Application Service (CAS™) for graduate management education programs partners with GMAC to further streamline GME admissions

WATERTOWN, Mass. (December 4, 2018) — Liaison International, the leading provider of higher education admissions management and enrollment marketing solutions, today announced its latest enhancement to BusinessCAS™, the Centralized Application Service (CAS™) for graduate management education programs. Beginning in December 2018, GME programs that are members of BusinessCAS can make the recommendation component of their application more consistent through the Graduate Management Admission Council’s Common Letter of Recommendation (LOR).

To address redundancies and introduce more efficiency to the GME application process, GMAC’s Common LOR replaces the need for applicants, recommenders and reviewers to manage multiple ad hoc recommendation forms. The more than 40 business schools that already accept the Common LOR leverage a common set of questions that facilitates a more holistic review of applicants.

“The Common LOR simplifies the business school application process and reduces the workload for candidates and their recommenders,” said Joy Jones, chief product officer at GMAC. “We’re excited that Liaison has decided to adopt the Common LOR into its BusinessCAS offering.”

Through integrating the Common LOR into BusinessCAS, Liaison enhances the experience for reviewers of applicants with a digitized, reader-friendly PDF output. The result is a streamlined recommendation process that provides deeper insight into a candidate’s capabilities.

“When our GMAC Application Process Advisory Group began discussions about simplifying the GME application in 2015, we knew we wanted to eventually get to a place where all of the components of this process were simplified. Based on our resources, we started on what we saw as one of the core pieces: the recommendation form,” shared Dee Steinle, executive director of MBA and MSB programs at the University of Kansas School of Business and vice chair of the BusinessCAS advisory board. “Bringing together the Common LOR and BusinessCAS will truly take us to the next level of evaluating leadership potential, character and quality of candidates, helping us to build a diverse workforce of innovative, forward-thinking leaders.”

In addition to simplifying the recommendation process, BusinessCAS further benefits participating schools and programs by adding them to a global GME marketplace and:

  • Driving awareness of business programs through a streamlined application process and communication tools that enable targeted, personalized communications to prospective students.
  • Decreasing time to decision by providing a processing team to scan transcripts and package application components as an extension of staff.
  • Providing insight into enrollment trends and performance on campus and within GME through robust analytics and reporting tools.

BusinessCAS benefits applicants by:

  • Offering a modern application experience that guides them through the application process.
  • Streamlining the process for those researching and applying to multiple programs of interest.
  • Providing 24/7 access to real-time application status updates.

To learn more about how BusinessCAS streamlines admissions for all stakeholders, visit businesscas.org.

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Over the last three decades, Liaison has helped over 40,000 programs on more than 1,200 campuses more effectively manage admissions through its Centralized Application Service (CAS™) technology and complementary application processing and support services. The higher education technology leader supports its partner institutions’ total enrollment goals by pairing CAS with its Enrollment Marketing (EM) platform as well as the recently acquired TargetX (CRM) and advanced analytics software Othot.