Get Your College Catalog Out On Time

By Author: Colleen Davis
Total Articles: 100
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College catalogs could spell the difference between having crowds of enrollees and trickles of enrollees in a particular school year. That is because the timing of the catalog printing and its release is crucial during the time when high school graduating students are already considering their courses or most probably the colleges to go to after graduation. If you are late in releasing your school’s catalogs, chances are, the students have already submitted their applications to other schools or worse, they have already been admitted. So even though your school’s programs are good, you can no longer compete for the cream of the crop and you will be left with the students that were not accepted into other schools.

But we all know that producing a catalog could mean a lot of stressful work. It will entail coordinating with the different department heads of your colleges. They are all busy people with varying temperaments so it is not easy to get the information from them. Plus you have to put together all their inputs and edit them so that everything is of the same format even if they are about different courses.

There ...
... is one thing that you could do to make your job easier. And that is to make the jobs of the department heads easier. Here are some ways you could go about it.

1. Request for the information for this school year one year in advance. Your catalog should be ready at least one semester ahead.

2. Since you will need uniform content for the college booklet, then make a uniform template that the department heads can just fill up. Depending on your format and the things you want to include, make a template where they will just write down the courses offered, descriptions, professors, amenities, supporting equipment, and the like.

3. Communicate by email and in-house chat service to make things easier. If possible, all copies should be in soft copy and e-mailed to you so that you do not have to re-type them and be prone to typographical errors. Likewise, photos should also be in digital format because it is time consuming to scan photos and that will also result in generation loss.

4. Organize your computer files. Have a separate folder for each department and several sub-folders for their data, such as, text, photos, correspondence, etc. Assign descriptive filenames so that you will not spend so much time browsing through everything if you need a particular file. For example, digital images are usually assigned a code and a number that will appear chronologically in a digital camera. Rename these with filenames like, “student01” or “professor_smith”.

5. Decide on a template and stick with it. If you keep on changing the look of your catalog out of whim, then you will waste so much time redoing it.

6. Some information on a college handbook is reused the following year. If you had been doing the catalog for several years, then you know which data are often rehashed. Save these so that you will not have to ask the department heads the same data. You will save them and yourself a lot of time and effort.

College catalogs may require hard work on your part and your staff. But with a good system in place, your catalog printing will be done on time and your copies released on schedule to your target students.

For more information, you can visit this page on catalog printing