Barnard College Builds a
Connected Student Success Experience
with Slate
By replacing paper-based processes with a single, flexible platform, Barnard transformed how students, faculty, and staff work together without adding complexity.
Institution Snapshot
Institution: Barnard College
Location: New York City
Enrollment: ~3,000 undergraduate students
Institution Type: Private liberal arts college for women
The Challenge
Barnard’s personalized approach to student-facing processes helped students feel seen, valued, and helped, but left staff and faculty over-burdened and under-resourced.
Academic forms, petitions, advising approvals, leave requests, and reviews were managed through paper, email, and disconnected tools. Students moved from office to office for signatures, while staff relied on spreadsheets for tracking. This limited faculty visibility to overall metrics and individual student status.
As a result, leadership couldn’t identify which processes broke, how badly, and worst of all, why.
Barnard needed a way to preserve its individualized approach while modernizing how work actually got done.
The Solution
Barnard implemented Slate as a unified platform for student success, starting with academic and advising workflows and expanding across the institution.
Using Slate’s native workflows, routing, and communications, Barnard digitized and automated its most critical processes while keeping flexibility for departments, advisors, and faculty.
Key capabilities of the new system include:
Online academic forms with faculty-friendly approvals and workflows
Centralized notes and early alerts with high-level review processes
Automated, highly personalized student communications
Slate quickly became the system of record for student processes, connecting offices that previously worked in isolation.
“We didn’t have to force people into a new way of working. Slate adapted to how Barnard already works and made it better.”
The Impact
Operational Efficiency
Multi-week processes reduced to one-day turnaround (academic review, probation notices, leave decisions)
Dozens of paper workflows fully digitized across advising, registrar, and dean’s offices
Decision communications fully automated, eliminating manual letter preparation
Adoption & Engagement
Hundreds of faculty and advisors trained with minimal support requests
Rapid faculty adoption through email-based approvals and queues
Multiple offices unified in a single system, including advising, dean’s offices, registrar, and first-generation support
Data & Institutional Insight
First-ever visibility into student request volume and process bottlenecks
Data used to justify a new full-time leave-of-absence case manager
Policy updates informed by aggregated workflow data
The Result
Slate didn’t just digitize forms. It changed how Barnard works together.
Advisors, deans, faculty, and support offices now operate in a shared environment, with visibility into student needs, consistent communication, and data that supports continuous improvement.
What began as an efficiency initiative became a foundation for a connected, student-centered campus ecosystem.
What’s Next
Barnard is expanding Slate to support appointment scheduling, graduation workflows, degree audits, and deeper faculty integration. The power and flexibility of the unified platform enables faculty, staff, and leadership to continue to deliver personalized student journeys with precision, efficiency, and joy.