Workday for Higher Education. 

Today, higher education face an unprecedented array of challenges. With the enrollment cliff looming in 2025—which is probable to impact the student population—colleges and universities are searching for opportunities to drive the value of higher education and help students realize how higher education can help improve their future employability and financial security. During these times, it’s critical for higher education to become more agile, make better and faster decisions, all while striving for student success.

Unfortunately, higher ed institutions are limited by antiquated administrative systems that were built pre-cloud and have large volumes of untrusted and siloed data that could be used to support decisions. Expensive to maintain and difficult to use, these legacy systems are too rigid to quickly adapt to change, making it challenging for colleges and universities to effectively achieve their vision of student success and experience while they plan, budget, and forecast.

Keep students at the center: As Workday applications continue to evolve, specific challenges facing higher education—both now and into the future—will remain front and center. For example, issues around persistence and completion helped shape the design of Workday Student to ensure that each student is matched with the right courses at the right time for a smooth pathway to graduation or other academic objectives. From admissions, to advising, records, financial aid, and student finance, Workday Student offers flexibility, delivers new insights, and provides a simplified student experience.

Shape your workforce strategy: To make data-driven and strategic decisions, institutions need access to scalable technology solutions that give them meaningful and trustworthy insights at their fingertips. HR teams need to quickly identify levers for current and future growth across key priorities—whether that’s upskilling, driving retention, fostering belonging, or accelerating career growth. By adopting a data-driven HR strategy, colleges and universities can prioritize problem-solving and driving strategies by automatically aligning data with business goals to make better people decisions, faster. And new generative AI capabilities to amplify human performance at work are being added to the growing roster of more than 40 AI and ML features already in Workday products today.

Make data your most strategic asset: Workday Financial Management combines in-memory accounting and analytics with a modern user experience to support the unique needs of colleges and universities—today and into the future. By leveraging data, academic leaders can capture the details of every financial transaction to better serve the institution and better equip all teams—not just finance—with relevant, contextual financial insights. Turning this data into actions, Workday accelerates the planning process, eliminating the need for a separate planning solution or complex, manual spreadsheets. Workday uses a single embedded analytics framework that allows data to be pulled from multiple sources, delivering rich insight into various facets of your institution.

Operate more efficiently and transparently: Unlike legacy workflow tools that are rigid and difficult to maintain and upgrade, the business process framework in Workday allows you to configure, copy, and extend more than 850 prebuilt delivered processes, allowing you to automate your manual processes with a wide range of business process actions, such as reviews and approvals. Workday offers unparalleled agility and adaptability to keep up with regulatory requirements, new policies, and grants, and provides real-time transaction audits for transparent accountability. You can easily track classroom observations, performance history, evaluations, teacher certifications and licenses, and succession planning, helping align teacher and principal goals to district-wide strategic plans and initiatives. Workday provides a single point of visibility into the budget, operations, and workforce of every department and/or program across your university or college.