$3.7 million in two and a half weeks: how MCC rebuilt scholarships for the quarter system

Metropolitan Community College awards scholarships four times a year with a five-person team. Since rebuilding the process on AwardSpring, applicants have nearly doubled and the dollars reaching students grew from $4.4 million to $7.3 million.

Metropolitan Community College in Omaha runs one of the most demanding scholarship calendars in higher education: a quarter system with awarding cycles in fall, winter, and spring, plus a high school scholarship cycle on top. The scholarship office that manages it, a team of five, administers institutional, foundation, state, and community partner awards, roughly 200 scholarships in all.

The office itself is young. MCC created it in 2018 after the college recognized a hard truth: money meant for students was sitting unspent because there was no process built to move it.

Before the rebuild

Applications used to arrive scattered, some through admissions systems, some on paper, with no central process. Award notifications went out as individual Outlook emails, with an administrative assistant borrowed from another office to help send them. Reviewers worked from Excel and Word packets assembled by hand. AwardSpring was technically in the building as early as 2015, but barely used: some years saw as few as 10 to 12 applications come through it.

One application, built around how students actually enroll

The turning point came in the 2020-21 year, when the Scholarship team rebuilt the process instead of carrying the old one forward. Because MCC students can enroll at any point in the year, the team created a single annual application that serves every quarter, open from May through February 1. Eventually, they cut it to one page that takes under five minutes, and replaced open-ended essays with a 150-to-300-word paragraph. Many of MCC’s scholarships use the same essay questions, so students only need to answer them once: AwardSpring automatically carries responses over to other scholarships with the same questions, making the process much easier for students. And since most of MCC’s 200 scholarships require no essay at all, that one short application makes a student eligible for nearly everything the college offers.

The team even used the data to retire summer awarding, after reports showed scholarship dollars concentrated almost entirely in the first three quarters.

“Students tell us all the time how easy the application is. It’s one page, it takes five minutes, and it makes them eligible for almost everything we offer.”

Sheila Schoessler, Director of Scholarships

The numbers a five-person team carries now

Applicants grew from 3,500 in 2022-23 to just under 7,000 last year. Funds transmitted to students grew from $4.4 million reaching 2,816 students to $7.3 million reaching 4,228 students. The dollars are MCC’s donors and programs at work; the rebuilt process is what lets a team this size move them.

Speed tells the same story. Awarding used to take four to five weeks per quarter. It now takes about two and a half, even with roughly 3,200 applicants in the fall quarter alone and about 6,500 by spring awarding, and 95% of offers go out inside that window. This fall quarter, MCC offered $3.7 million to nearly 1,400 students in two and a half weeks, almost half of what the office moved in the entire 2022-23 year.

The text message worth a hundred scholarships

Acceptances used to mean cycles of calls and emails chasing students who had won money and not claimed it. Last cycle the team sent a single text reminder through the platform: 100 additional students accepted their awards within two days. Moving acceptances into AwardSpring, where students already apply, also cut the confused calls that came from juggling a separate system.

The recovered hours went somewhere that used to be neglected: staff now actively monitor whether scholarship recipients are meeting their requirements.

Three reviewers, one of them AI, and every deadline met

This past year the team put SpringIQ, AwardSpring’s AI assistant, to work as one of the three reviewers on each foundation application, with people holding the other two seats and the final word. Every foundation scholarship review finished on time, without staff scrambling to fill reviewer slots. It is exactly how we believe AI belongs in this work: carrying a seat, never the gavel.

“Thanks to the working partnership with AwardSpring, the Scholarships Office at MCC is optimizing the student scholarship application process and is also able to optimize every dollar available for our students. I’m proud of the work they have done.”

Christopher Swanson, Associate Vice President of Mission Advancement and Strategic Resources

Advice from eight years in

Sheila’s counsel to peers weighing a platform change is simple:

“Don’t just move your old application onto new software. Rethink the whole process around your students. That’s where our growth came from.”

And after a decade with AwardSpring, she points to the partnership itself: feature requests from her team keep showing up in the product, and support is a person she knows by name.