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 AI-powered Operating System for Student Enrollments. It is a unified, modular, and automated platform purpose-built for educational organisations, enabling them to attract, engage, and enrol students while automating the entire enquiry-to-enrollment journey.
Its purpose-built suite, spanning Education CRM®, the Application & Post-Application Platform, the Student Engagement Suite, marketing automation, and enrollment intelligence, comes together as Enrollment Cloud®, acting as the system of record for the enrollment journey. Fee collection connects at the point of admission through Collexo®, NoPaperForms’ Operating System for Fee Collections and Payments.
Across the platform sits Mio AI™, NoPaperForms’ natively built layer of agentic AI and its intelligence layer. Within Meritto, Mio AI embeds intelligent, autonomous, and semi-autonomous agents into day-to-day institutional workflows, serving as digital teammates for different teams, from scaling student engagement to increasing team productivity and performance.
Used by over 1,000 educational organisations globally, Meritto is designed to handle 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 in 2020.
It covers the impact on the admissions pipeline, changes in student engagement and enquiry trends before and after the lockdown, shifts in student decision-making, the ripple effects across the admission cycle, and findings from an all-India survey of academic institutions. It also offers possible strategic responses and a preparedness checklist, making it both an analysis and a planning resource for that period.
Student engagement and enquiry patterns shifted noticeably once the lockdown took effect, as prospective students moved almost entirely to digital channels and their behaviour changed in both timing and intensity.
Comparing the periods before and after the lockdown reveals how enquiry volumes and engagement evolved under the new conditions. The report brings these before-and-after trends together so institutions could see concretely how prospective student behaviour had moved, and plan their outreach around the new reality rather than the old one.
Digital transformation became essential because processes that relied on physical presence, such as campus visits, offline events, in-person counselling, and paper-based steps, simply could not function during lockdown.
Institutions that had digitised their admissions could continue engaging and enrolling students, while those still dependent on offline methods stalled. The pandemic turned what had been a gradual shift toward digital into an immediate necessity, which is a large part of why the report emphasises digital readiness as central to weathering the disruption.
