Issues with MyDelta continue to affect students seven weeks into the fall semester.
The new registration system will have problems into next spring. Problems are still being encountered in areas such as financial aid, official records, and education planning.
Assistant Superintendent/Vice President of Student Services Dr. Lisa Cooper-Wilkins sent out another update on these issues last week.
Recently the campus has found that students’ majors are incorrect in the system for more than 18,000 students. Delta had 23,892 students according to California Community College’s 2018 Student Success Scorecard. A fix is currently in the works, according to Cooper-Wilkins’ email, but an additional 371 students will need to have their cases handled manually.
There was also an update on problems with students receiving the California College Promise Grant (formerly known as the BOG Waiver).
“The Director of Financial Aid is uncertain at this time of the precise number of students who have been impacted by this; however, the Financial Aid Office has received well over 1,000 applications. Determining how many of these are eligible or ineligible will take approximately three weeks to manually process,” said Cooper-Wilkins via Alex Breitler, Delta’s Acting Director of Marketing, Communication and Outreach, in an email.
Problems with providing students with transcripts in the new system were also addressed.
“In the meantime, a service indicator will be placed on student records with data errors to allow A&R to print transcripts from MyDelta until there is a more comprehensive data solution. Approximately 1 percent of all students were impacted by this issue, and A&R has an estimated date of October 18th to have this data error corrected,” said Wilkins. “Per our Director of Admissions & Records.”
All new admissions and records data beginning from Fall 2019 will go solely through PeopleSoft because System 2020, the previous registration system, is not being updated.
In Cooper-Wilkins’ ERP email update from last week she says, “should a student who has a data error need an official transcript from PeopleSoft we will be able to manually update the record and produce an accurate transcript.”
Counselors are still unable to update education plans. Old plans are available upon request.
The Board of Trustees has taken notice of these problems.
At the Sept. 24 meeting, the board voted to approve a change order with Highstreet IT Solutions, the firm helping the college implement MyDelta. During discussion, Board President Catherine Mathis questioned whether continuing work on MyDelta was worth it.
“This has been a total disaster. And it’s been a lot of money and I am not inclined to throw good money after bad,” Mathis said. “And getting the answer, ‘well, if you don’t give us another $2 million, we aren’t going to get payroll out’ is not an acceptable explanation.”
Questions from The Collegian about issues with the new registration system for administrators on campus have been directed to Delta’s marketing department.
According to President/Superintendent Omid Pourzanjani, management has chosen to take this route in order to “not cause further aggravation or increase negative publicity.” In previous semesters, The Collegian has had few issues communicating directly with Delta College’s top-level administrators for other stories.
“By directing you to marketing, admin has diverted the opportunity to set the record straight,” said Jim Ewert, a General Counselor for the California News Publishers Association, of which The Collegian is a member.