Students nationwide will by now know if they have made it to a Higher Education Institution (HEI) after the launch of the 7th National Online Selections by the Department of Higher Education Research Science and Technology (DHERST) was launched yesterday. Out of the 29, 742 students who sat for the Grade 12 National Examinations this year, only 10, 007 grade 12 students have been selected to enter tertiary level for the 2024 academic year. According to DHERST Acting Secretary Fr Jan Czuba, since the development of the national online selections system in 2017 and the online Application in 2018, more than 4, 000 good applications were always missed during the time of manual selections. But with the online selections, applicants will be selected properly. He said that students and parents can have easy access to this information by simply using their mobile phones and internet access instead of waiting for the selectors to print and put out the list of students who passed. “The power of digitalization is tremendous.” “We overlooked the public’s opinion about not many people having access to mobile phones and the internet which but that was wrong.” “Many young people have phones that have access to the internet.” He also stated that, before the systems were launched, the department had to pay thousands of kina to fly selectors from various institutions just to select students by going through all the forms and stressed that that was a lot of work both financially and physically. Now a days, students are given the upper hand by having 5 choices to choose which institution they wanted to study at via the application and the programs they want to take. Fr Czuba further stated that, they will develop additional modules which will have information of students in grade 11 will already have a file on the system once they reach grade 12. “We will also make sure that, the system or modules were developing will incorporate virtual classrooms with additional links like Zoom, create a one-in-Cloud Library which will contain all teaching and learning resources to support our universities and specialized college.”