Senior Systems, from Community Brands vs. Ellucian Colleague

Senior Systems school software is great for small schools looking for a software package that can be implemented across many departments in the school at a reasonable price. Senior Systems does offer on boarding and training to help learn the system but continuing training is difficult though also necessary. Senior's admissions software modules leave much to be desired though they have purchased Ravenna which offers a top-of-the-line option that blends very well with Senior.

Incentivized

Colleague Student is a great solution for smaller schools. I'm not sure it would work well at a large university (10,000 plus students) -- I'm not sure it has capacity to handle that. It is also well suited for universities where departments communicate well with each other. There is so much cross functionality, that if departments don't communicate well, issues could arise if one department makes changes without notifying or talking with other departments about the change

Incentivized

• A broad-based, unified platform that can be used in many areas across campus.
• Robust database that is very customizable.
• A web-based platform that can be used on any device.

Incentivized

• Colleague offers a single reference point for all student data, which creates consistency and unity across campus and ensures students hear the same information from every source.
• Colleague recently updated its interface to be more accessible to all people. Previously, it was not accessible through any browser aside from Internet Explorer.
• Colleague provide helpful user restrictions that prevent departments from altering or erasing data they do not typically use. For example, I cannot change student billing and accidentally wreak havoc for the cashier's office.

Incentivized

• Outdated look and feel for internal and external customers.
• Somewhat complicated and tough to learn; it's not very intuitive.
• Customer service response times and support leave something to be desired.

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

On the admissions front, SchoolAdmin beats the Senior Admissions module hands down for ease of use, performance, customer service, and reliability. We have had no downtime issues with Senior but regularly experienced downtime issues with Senior. School Admin is also very intuitive and easy to learn and use. Senior has a much steeper learning curve.

Incentivized

Ellucian Colleague remains the most cost competitive solution for our organization. Alternative solutions, have had ridiculously high migration costs and ongoing maintenance fees which have not been friendly toward a migration of our existing data. Some the features of the other solutions are very nice to "haves" but the reward has to out-weigh the cost of adoption.

Incentivized

• A fairly priced system.
• [The] convenience of having to manage only one system and database.
• Senior is long overdue for an update and refresh to make it look modern and to make it more easy and intuitive to use.

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