As Higher Ed Faces an Enrollment Cliff, Transfer Students Are One Answer--If Institutions Can Process Them Fast Enough

• Colleges are losing students, and time; Hyland's Intelligent Transcripts eliminates the manual delays that slow admissions decisions and erode enrollment yield
• Agentic AI that understands academic records - interpreting complex, multi-page student transcripts - delivers decision-ready data to admissions officers
• From single workflow to enterprise platform, institutions can now extend AI-native automation beyond transcripts to any academic or administrative document process

CLEVELAND, Aug. 12, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- As colleges and universities face mounting enrollment pressures, many admissions teams remain burdened by manual transcript processes that slow decisions and create friction at critical moments in the enrollment journey. With institutions competing harder than ever for every prospective student, and transcript evaluations often requiring more than 20 minutes per document, delays in admissions and credit transfer decisions can mean lost enrollment opportunities.

The Enrollment Math Has Changed

The college applicant pool is shrinking as U.S. high school graduates, the traditional pipeline for first-time freshmen, peaked at 3.9 million in 2025 and are projected to decline 13% to 3.4 million by 2041. The "enrollment cliff," driven by more than a decade of declining birth rates, means institutions can no longer rely on organic growth from first-time, first-year students to fill seats. Future enrollment growth will increasingly depend on institutions reaching beyond the traditional freshman pipeline, driving focus on transfer students: adult learners, military-affiliated students, and those returning to complete a degree.

But transfer students are also the hardest applicants to process. Unlike a standard first-year transcript, transfer records often span multiple institutions, inconsistent formats, partial credit histories, and course equivalencies that require manual evaluation. It is exactly the kind of document-heavy, judgment-intensive work that has resisted automation, which is why despite the strategic importance of this segment, most institutions still evaluate transfer transcripts by hand.

The result is a costly mismatch: institutions are chasing the one applicant pool that's actually growing, while relying on the slowest, most error-prone process to serve them.

That is why today, Hyland, a global leader in enterprise content management (ECM) and the pioneer of the content-powered agentic enterprise, is announcing Intelligent Transcripts. This AI-native academic document intelligence solution addresses these challenges by transforming complex academic records into structured, actionable information that helps institutions accelerate admissions workflows, improve efficiency and deliver decisions faster.

"While institutions are committed to moving faster and improving student experiences, manual transcript processing remains the critical bottleneck slowing admissions decisions at every turn," said Rebecca Whitworth, Ph.D., general manager of education product and solutions at Hyland. "Intelligent Transcripts transforms that manual process into AI-native automation, making transcript data immediately usable so teams can spend less time processing and more time making decisions that support the institution, students and their communities."

"AI-native technologies, such as Hyland's Intelligent Transcripts, will help teams eliminate the manual, time-consuming work that has traditionally slowed down the transcript evaluation processes," said Valerie Campbell, associate registrar at Grand Rapids Community College. "The workflow to correct errors is intuitive, removes the guesswork and directs the user to the required corrections so they can be made efficiently and with a few clicks of the mouse. This significantly reduces overall transcript processing time and the element of human error that can occur during manual input."

Turning Academic Documents into Real-Time Decisions

Unlike traditional, extraction-focused technologies, Hyland's Intelligent Transcripts leverages a native AI engine with agentic reasoning capabilities to understand, interpret and act on complex academic records within end-to-end workflows. The solution goes beyond data capture to orchestrate entire processes, ensuring transcript data is immediately usable across admissions, transfer evaluation and downstream systems.

By converting academic records into trusted, decision-ready data, institutions can significantly reduce delays tied to manual review and data entry while improving accuracy and consistency across transcript formats.

Accelerating Admissions, Transfer and Student Onboarding

Hyland's Intelligent Transcripts enables higher education leaders to:

• Accelerate admissions and transfer decisions by automating transcript review, validation and routing, removing bottlenecks that delay student offers and enrollment timelines
• Improve decision accuracy with agentic understanding and validation of complex, multi-page transcript formats, eliminating manual data entry and repetitive administrative work
• Solve the one bottleneck legacy systems couldn't touch, transfer credit evaluation, historically too variable and labor-intensive to automate, now handled with agentic accuracy at scale
• Deliver faster, more responsive student experiences that improve enrollment yield and institutional competitiveness

A Platform Approach to Academic Document Automation

Built on Hyland's enterprise content and process platform, Intelligent Transcripts integrates directly into existing systems, including OnBase and student information systems, to orchestrate workflows across admissions and registrar functions. The solution also supports human-in-the-loop validation, with exceptions routed for human review only when agent confidence falls below thresholds established by the institution, ensuring governance and oversight without requiring review of every document.

Importantly, Intelligent Transcripts is designed as an extensible platform, enabling institutions to expand AI-driven automation beyond transcripts to additional academic and administrative document workflows over time.

For more information on Hyland's platform and solutions, please visit Hyland.com.

About Hyland
Hyland is the pioneer of the Content Innovation Cloud™ , delivering ubiquitous enterprise intelligence to organizations with solutions that unlock actionable insights and drive automation. Trusted by thousands of organizations worldwide, including many of the Fortune 100, Hyland's solutions create the foundation for a connected, agentic enterprise, where teams harness the power of AI to redefine how they operate and engage with those they serve. For additional information on Hyland's platform and services, please visit Hyland.com.

Media contact:
Jason Gerdon
[email protected]

SOURCE Hyland