City College Of San Francisco Prints Student IDs In One-Sixth The Time

About City College of San Francisco

The City College of San Francisco is a large, urban community college offering associate degrees as well as non-credit educational experiences in more than 50 academic programs and over 100 occupational disciplines—to more than 100,000 students each year. Made up of 10 campuses, City College is a place of affordable opportunity for individuals from the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond.

Challenge

As one of the largest community colleges in the country, City College provides a quality, affordable education option for the Bay Area. To better compete with other area colleges and universities, the college has initiated a number of upgrades to its internal IT infrastructure.

In the admissions office, that meant improving the process of issuing student identification cards. Before, producing each card took a minute-and-a-half. Across 100,000 students, that time made for frustrating waits for students and exhausting days for staff during peak times.

“At the beginning of every semester, students formed long lines that spilled out the doorway of the admissions office,” said Chinh Nguyen, IS administrator at City College. “This caused concern with facility management as the students were causing congestion and creating potential fire code violations.”

On top of slow printing, as many as three out of 10 cards printed were defective, so the staff had to reprint nearly a third of all IDs, increasing production times, wait times and material costs for the office. In addition to faster printing, City College wanted to upgrade cards to include higher-quality photos and magnetic striping so students could use them throughout the campus.

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