Colleague Student is our SMS choice
November 21, 2018

Colleague Student is our SMS choice

Jamie Scott | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Colleague Student

We currently use Colleague Student to store and track all of the student's demographic information which includes current and former contact information as well as relatives and their current and former demographics. We also manage academic records from creating a course to when students register and enroll for courses. All of their transcript information is kept by Colleague, too. We receive payments on their student accounts and track their financial aid. We also store and track campus organizations with their membership as well.

Pros

  • Colleague Student does a good job of creating a core of data that can be accessed across multiple Colleague applications from HR to managing alumni once the students graduate.
  • We customize Colleague Student by creating computed fields that are accessible on screens as well as reports. We also customize delivered screens as well as create our own custom screens.
  • We are able to easily give users permission to only what they need to see and keep them from accessing areas outside their purview.

Cons

  • Ellucian had made good progress with its UI, but it still could be a much better experience.
  • The programming language used to create screens and computed columns was created by the company, then Datatel, now Ellucian. It is a bit of a learning curve.
  • 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.
I have not personally used any other SMS systems.
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.

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