Impact of COVID-19 on Admissions 2020
The Coronavirus pandemic has dramatically reshaped life and living across the world. While change is apparent with Higher-ed Institutions and their admissions, detailed insights into the student engagement, inquiry, and admissions trends before and after the lockdown can help you plan your next actions with admissions.
We looked into the trends that emerged post-lockdown that was announced by the Government of India, and brought them all onto the table to give basis to our “Admission 2020 Impact Report”.
What’s in it for you?
- Impact of the Lockdown on Admissions Pipeline
- How has it impacted the student decision making process?
- What does the industry think: an All India Survey of Academic Institutions
- Your possible Strategic Responses to the COVID-19 impact on admissions
- Ripple effects of the lockdown throughout the admission cycle
- Preparedness checklist to steer ahead admissions while bracing minimal impact
Frequently Asked Questions
Get answers to frequently asked questions about everything we do.Meritto, the flagship product of NoPaperForms, is the Operating System for Student Enrollments. It is a unified, AI-powered, modular, and automated platform purpose-built for educational organisations, enabling them to attract, engage, and enrol students while automating the entire enquiry-to-enrolment process.
Its comprehensive suite of purpose-built tools, including Enrollment Cloud, Education CRM, Application Platform, Education Payment Cloud, and Modern Engagement Suite, acts as the system of record for enrolments and seamlessly addresses every aspect of the enrolment process.
At the heart of Meritto lies its natively built layer of agentic AI, Mio AI. This layer introduces intelligent, autonomous, and semi-autonomous agents into everyday institutional workflows. Mio AI agents are embedded across the Meritto platform and serve as digital teammates for different teams, helping institutions scale student engagement and improve team productivity and performance.
Used by over 1,000 educational organisations globally, Meritto supports complex, high-volume admissions environments with scalability, security, and deep process configurability across all verticals of education.
The Admission 2020 Impact Report is a study of how the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting lockdown affected higher education admissions in India during 2020.
It examines the impact on the admissions pipeline, changes in student engagement and enquiry trends before and after the lockdown, shifts in student decision-making, and the wider effects across the admissions cycle.
The report also includes findings from an all-India survey of academic institutions, possible strategic responses, and a preparedness checklist, making it both an analytical and planning resource for that period.
Student engagement and enquiry patterns changed noticeably after the lockdown as prospective students moved almost entirely towards digital channels and their behaviour shifted in both timing and intensity.
Comparing the periods before and after the lockdown showed how enquiry volumes and engagement evolved under the new conditions.
The report brought these trends together so institutions could understand how prospective student behaviour had changed and adapt their outreach to the new environment rather than relying on previous assumptions.
Digital transformation became essential because admissions processes that depended on campus visits, offline events, in-person counselling, physical documents, and other forms of physical interaction could not continue during lockdown.
Institutions that had digitised their admissions processes were better positioned to continue engaging prospective students and managing enrolments, while those relying heavily on offline methods experienced greater disruption.
The pandemic accelerated what had previously been a gradual shift towards digital admissions and made digital readiness central to maintaining continuity during the disruption.
