Workday's Enduring Partnership With Higher Education

In this article we discuss:

• A Trusted Partnership to Deliver a Unified Cloud Platform
• Aligning Our Product Priorities With the Needs of the Industry
• What’s Ahead in Higher Education and Workday Student
• Facing the Future Together

As the former CIO of The Ohio State University, I’ve dedicated the past 20 years to serving the needs of higher education and helping colleges and universities fulfill their mission to students and their community using innovative technology. I brought that passion to Workday with me two years ago. 

Since that time, I have seen our Student product replace legacy vendors with a native cloud solution that is highly configurable and built on a platform that scales. In true cloud fashion, the product has grown and evolved with our industry. Today, we support multi-institution functionality, allowing institutions like the University of Arkansas System and Louisiana State University to bring all their disparate legacy systems into a single tenant. That has enabled teams to harness the power of their data and inform decision-making at the highest level within their institutions and systems. In fact, it is humbling and exciting to share that Workday Student has been recognized as a Leader by various industry analysts such as IDC MarketScape: North America Higher Education SaaS and Cloud-Enabled Student Information Systems 2024, The Tambellini Group StarChart 2024 Student Systems, and 2025 Gartner® Magic QuadrantTM for Higher Education Student Information System Software as a Service.   

But the promise of Workday goes beyond any single product. Workday is a solution that allows higher education institutions to manage all the personas on their campus—from faculty to senior administrators to students. Investments made at the “core”—such as AI or enhancements to shared frameworks—can be quickly applied to use cases across all Workday products. The extensibility of the platform (via Extend and the AI Gateway) allows customers and partners to amplify Workday’s core product investments to develop unique solutions that address their specific use cases and create a cohesive and consistent user experience on campus.

Today, as senior vice president and group general manager of a newly formed industry product team in our product and technology organization, I can confirm that Workday remains committed to continued investment in this industry. We are ready to partner with you to build on the successful digital transformations that Workday has enabled across more than 500 institutions of higher education, and I believe we’re uniquely positioned to do so. We have innovative, market-leading products and an industry team that has many years of experience in higher education, spanning from faculty to student administration to information technology.

A Trusted Partnership to Deliver a Unified Cloud Platform

One of the many ways that I stay connected with the challenges facing higher education is through my visits to campuses across the country. As I meet with leaders at many different types of institutions, they share how much they value the partnership they have with Workday. In any partnership, trust is paramount, and I do not take the trust that our customers place in us lightly. This foundation of trust fosters a level of collaboration that is unique in the industry and certainly in my career.

Our customers are highly engaged and participate actively in our design partner groups, user groups, and advisory councils. They shape the content for our summit that occurs before Workday Rising, our marquee customer event; the summit continues to grow and expand every year. They participate in conferences like AACRAO, EDUCAUSE, HEUG, NACUBO, and NASFAA and share their lessons learned with peers through presentations, birds of a feather discussions, and hallway conversations. 

And in the enduring spirit of higher education, they help each other in countless ways outside of these formal forums to realize as much value as they can out of their Workday investment. It is with and for these customers that we will continue to deliver a world-class platform to meet the ever-evolving needs of higher education and enable our customers to stay apace with a technology landscape that is advancing at a rate never seen before.

Aligning Our Product Priorities With the Needs of the Industry 

As part of our commitment to higher education, we recently surveyed higher education leaders across the country about their most pressing challenges, the opportunities they are prioritizing, and what they need from a student information system to help them move their institutions forward. Here are some of the key insights they shared, along with how we see our Workday solutions helping to address these challenges.

Modern student experience and engagement: 78% of Institutions surveyed are striving to deliver personalized, modern, and engaging experiences that drive student retention and achievement. Workday's solutions are designed to provide a modern user experience that puts power in the hands of students through self-service and surfaces the data and insights necessary to support staff, faculty, and students throughout the students’ academic journey, from admissions to graduation.

Operational agility: Over 88% of institutions indicated that rising operational costs are a significant challenge. In an era of shrinking budgets and increasing competition, institutions must optimize their operations to maximize resources. Workday's unified platform streamlines administrative processes, enabling institutions to focus on their core mission of teaching and research. One of the key areas in which we have demonstrated success in the past two years has been in the advancements that we have made in our grants management capabilities.

Solutions to automate, optimize, and drive value: 74% of leaders said that changing student demographics—including the decline of traditionally aged students—is another significant challenge. We continue to enhance our platform with features and functionalities specifically designed for the higher education sector, such as the renewed vision we announced at our Workday Rising event last year to improve academic and career mobility for students.

Insight for data-driven decisions: From our conversations with customers, we know that the changes being implemented by the federal government are causing significant challenges for institutions. Institutions need to quickly access timely and accurate data to make informed decisions about everything from academic planning to financial management. Workday's analytics capabilities provide the insights needed to drive strategic initiatives and improve institutional performance. 

What’s Ahead in Higher Education and Workday Student

Workday Student is already seen as an industry leader, but we know from the many conversations we’ve had with our customers that there’s room to grow—both to meet the needs of different types of institutions and to keep up with the changes in both the industry and the technology landscape. So, here’s a sense of what’s in store:

We know that we need to continue to scale our product to support large, complex customers. This includes increased automation, improved performance, and enhanced capabilities, such as real-time billing for students.

We hear loud and clear that you need more flexibility as you continue to grow your academic offerings. We will be providing greater program flexibility to allow you to better support non-traditional programs and new educational models.

We know it’s important to you that your students have modern, engaging experiences, so we continue to invest in a refreshed student registration experience. Improvements will include more intuitive and convenient ways to search for courses and register by providing a calendar-based visual schedule builder using drag and drop interfaces that lets students “see and do” in an interactive way.

Based on feedback from our Grants Advisory Council, we’ll be developing a new payroll accounting reallocation, which will greatly simplify making payroll accounting changes for grants, something that occurs in huge volumes and requires large effort. In addition, to make managing cross-disciplinary/cross department research more helpful, we're building new reporting capabilities with more flexible access controls so that grants administrators and principal investigators have more insights.

In addition to these key investments, Workday Illuminate will transform higher education by:

• Streamlining transcript processing and automating transfer credit evaluation by converting unstructured documents to structured data, which is then inserted into the appropriate fields in Workday. This reduces manual effort and minimizes data-entry errors. And of course, there’s always a human in the loop to review and verify. 
• Leveraging machine learning to automatically recommend an equivalent internal course when a student submits an external course for which no equivalency already exists in the customer tenant. This recommendation is based on your own data and patterns, along with your previous articulations of credit. The evaluator can then accept the recommendation and create a rule for future transfer credit evaluation, thereby streamlining the process.
• Using generative AI to provide a summary of calculation engine configuration to help administrators better troubleshoot and configure the system to meet their needs.
• Using GenAI in the Career Hub to leverage additional data sources such as performance reviews, goals, job interests, and skills within the last 12 months to automatically curate development items for workers. This makes it quicker to identify items—and actually realize and complete the items—contributing to succession planning and growth for employees to keep them engaged and retained.

And the possibilities of agentic AI to deliver incredible value is prominent across the platform, including with grants. We are working toward a goal of providing faculty with what they need to do their jobs across both teaching and research. A grants management agent could focus on supporting faculty with their administrative functions like purchasing, expense reports, and budget management.

Facing the Future Together

The landscape of higher education feels like it’s evolving daily, giving rise to an environment where uncertainty is nearly the only certainty. We know based on our conversations and research that you are navigating a complex web of challenges and opportunities. 

At Workday, we understand that your institutions are not just places of learning; they are vital engines of innovation, research, and societal progress. Our mission is anchored in your mission. That's why our commitment to higher education extends beyond providing technology solutions; it's about fostering a collaborative partnership aimed at empowering institutions and students to thrive in an ever-changing world. Let’s move higher education forever forward… together.

Gartner disclaimer

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Higher Education Student Information System Software as a Service, By Robert Yanckello, Grace Farrell, 19 March 2025

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, MAGIC QUADRANT is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

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