Ellucian Colleague

Best Student ERP System in the market today (price to value). Other solutions are not financially feasible due to the Database price, licensing fee, support, and maintenance. The staff know-how in Database administration is also another factor to consider in choosing the ERP system. Colleague is using the Unidata database - very affordable and very easy to maintain.

Colleague is a time tested solution that still manages to get the work done. Updates are still made regularly and the backend functions remain reliably compliant. There are some limitations to the database that some other solutions may do better as they do not have a long history of legacy elements to support. Still the solution remains reliable and trustworthy, where newcomer solutions may be a little too green field and costly to initiate a change.

Ellucian Colleague is well suited for an organization looking for a solution that is flexible and allows them to design workflows and processes that align with their business. Ellucian Colleague is able to bring a unique integration strategy into your organization and connect to third-party systems and data very effectively.

Colleague is well suited to those looking for a one-stop shop for Higher Education. Additionally, they provide tools to customize most of their products. They are top notch for those looking for a student life cycle. Schools looking for an out of the box solution will do fairly well here as well when paired with a company to help manage the server sprawl and updates.

Since the student area is the primary focus, there are other best of breed tools for other areas for those not looking for a student focused toolset.

Colleague ensures all campus officials have access to the same information in a central location. It ensures students are scheduled for courses and automatically matches the registered courses with fees for student billing. Similarly, it automatically syncs housing assignments with the proper billing amount and updates as students pay tuition and fees. It is least helpful in student conduct, and my institution recently adopted a new, comprehensive software to fill the gap. Colleague tracks student data, not student interactions.

Colleague Student is a lifesaver in situations where I need to get in contact with students in situations of high importance. I can figure out when they will be in their class which makes it easier to have the professor connect with a student of concern or I can look up a phone number to give the student a call. Colleague also helps in the housing department to charge students for any damage fees resident may incur while staying in the residence halls.

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.

Colleague works well for small schools with a VERY simple curriculum. It is not designed for bigger schools that need flexibility. For years the system has put Registrars in a bad place by saying "this can't be done in our current student system," giving Registrars the image of being barriers to progress.

Colleague Student helps to check on the academic history of students immediately and their hiatus which I find useful. I just get frustrated with the number of buttons and associated buttons that make it annoying to find which way to go back to a current page I am looking at.

Colleague can work very well straight out of the box with very little or no customization. There is some thoughtful setup required, though. Even though it works fine as a vanilla flavored application, it can be customized to accommodate most situations. We used it for two physically separated campuses and colleges as part of the same university out of the same database. We were able to use delivered functionality to keep the colleges separate when appropriate. When we needed to see the colleges as one university that was also delivered functionality.