Starting this fall semester, every person who applies for graduate school at Kent State will be applying on one single website.

On July 12 the Faculty Senate approved consolidating the application processes for both the Graduate School of Management and the Graduate School of Education, Health and Human Services with the operations the Division of Graduate Studies provide.

Senior associate provost Tim Chandler, whose office pushed for the change, said it would bring greater efficiency to the two graduate schools’ staff.

“If you’re going to have three different groups doing the same task, you’re employing more people in those areas than necessary,” Chandler said.

Frederick Schroath, special advisor to the dean for the College of Business and Administration, said none of these changes will impact any of its seven graduate programs or how graduate students are selected from the more than 600 applications received every year.

“We won’t be giving up our decision-making,” Schroath said.

Nancy Barbour, associate dean of graduate education for the College of Education, Health and Human Services, said she agreed the consolidation will make the application process and organization “more efficient” while not affecting any of EHHS’ 49 graduate programs or the more than 3,250 graduate applications.

Because the Division of Graduate Studies only offers online applications, paper applications for graduate school will effectively go away.

Both graduate schools had already transitioned to online applications a while back but still accepted paper applications, Barbour and Schroath said.

Storing single copies of paper applications led to temporarily lost or misplaced applications, Schroath said.

“The actual mechanics of admitting the student don’t matter so much to me as long as it’s an efficient process and doesn’t interfere with the ability to admit students,” Schroath said.

Contact Summer Kent Stater reporter Simon Husted at [email protected].