Anthology Student vs. Ellucian Colleague

I think that CampusNexus Student does what it is created to do. If you are looking for a customizable system to track student data, I have no complaints. If you are looking for the newest, shiniest software, this might not be for you. While it can be glitchy sometimes, and feels outdated, it does its job and I have never felt like I couldn't do what I need to do because of any of those things.

Incentivized

Ellucian Colleague is wonderful at streamlining processes and unifying data related to students, finance, human resources, and financial aid. It continues to support and manage administrative needs, enhance student experiences, and improve operational efficiency across the University. Ellucian Colleague is less suited for quick data retrieval and comprehensive financial reporting. These functions could use some improvement to optimize the user experience.

• Particularly well, CampusNexus identifies at-risk students. In our school, and in any school, but in many city schools or schools with a lack of parent involvement or large populations, it is crucial to be able to identify students at risk of failing or struggling. This is something that is extremely effectively done here.
• An additional strength I see is the ability to track graduate requirements. This is easily shared with students, parents, and the rest of the administration, to track and assist in student growth.
• Academic records need to be shared and sent to colleges, parents and other high schools. Controlling academic records is a strength because it tallies the entire career of a student. Using this system helps to solidify communication.

Incentivized

• Colleague Student allows us to integrate services across the university for students with staff in various departments able to see the information about a student that they need to serve the student well.
• Colleague Student makes it easy to see our students current academic record as well as transfer courses (and information) and their past records here at the university. Our old system required a lot of homegrown connection points to be able to see all of this information. It was neither quick nor easy.
• Colleague Student makes the registration process for our students much easier. Our old system was clunky and would often prevent students from registering for a class but not provide information for them about why. Colleague Student makes it easy for students to see if they are missing a pre-requisite, have a hold, etc., so they can know how to get their registration back on track.

Incentivized

• Support and resolution of issues can be slow, even major issues that interrupt business operations
• Developers need higher quality control in their processes to mitigate bugs and defects
• Solution architects need higher level of ownership in aligning configurations with business processes
• Financial aid needs greater automation without requiring the purchase of the specific financial aid automation module

Incentivized

• Develop API's that are vendor agnostic rather than selecting specific vendors (Clearinghouse, ImageNow).
• Colleague tends to be to reactionary to the changing needs in higher education rather than developing the future.
• Hound clients to pay extra for consulting (consultants are usually bad), rather than helping institutions to use the product. Seems to be the first thing help line personnel jump to rather than working with clients to figure out creative solutions.

Incentivized

For decades, Ellucian Colleague has served the University as our primary student record-retention CRM. Its functionality has weathered many recent trends in CRM development and continues to produce the needed results for our constituency and the size of our university. We look forward to continuing to utilize Ellucian Colleague in the future.

Incentivized

I have not come across other platforms that can do what CampusNexus provides. There are platforms such as Skedula for tracking grades. There are add-ins to websites such as MoodleRooms to provide curriculum and content management support. However, I have not found a platform that provides grades, curriculum, key functions for enrollment and tracking your own academic progress as well as analytical abilities. CampusNexus provides the output of data and results from a wide range of data sets. Tracking the data and being able to output it into charts and graphics for all educators, administration, and politicians can improve the culture of a school district. Providing all of this data can transform an entire educational institution.

Incentivized

I did not use Jenzabar as extensively as Colleague, but they perform similar functions for student information tracking. I think Colleague is more appropriate for use across campus, as its student billing and scheduling options exceed Jenzabar. Jenzabar, however, offers better tools for use exclusively in student affairs. If an organization wants to track all student data, they should consider Colleague.

Incentivized

• It helps us manage our current students

Incentivized

• By keeping student's academic work, financial aid, and accounts receivable information in one location we are able to report without the need for data aggregation.
• Colleague's web applications allow the students themselves to perform tasks such as enrollment without assistance from staff members.
• Using customized rules that we can set up in Colleague we can trigger events to happen as data is entered. This eliminates the need not only for someone to remember to perform an additional task, but it also saves the time of performing the actual task.

Incentivized