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The module that breaks is the one your faculty live in.

Campus programs do not fail at go-live. They fail three years later, in grants, in faculty pay, and in the student system that keeps getting deferred. The peer record is unusually public: legislative audits, faculty senate surveys, student newspapers. Read the risk board, walk the five decisions, then run the two-minute check.

Live on Workday Student85 of 200+

Institutions live against institutions signed, eight years after the first go-live. Well over a hundred campuses are in flight at once. The binding constraint is the implementation labor market, not the software.

01Where It Breaks

Six modules, ranked by what the peer record shows

Not a capability matrix. This is where published audits, faculty surveys and institutional announcements say campus programs get hurt, and it is not evenly distributed.

Highest riskGrants and research administration
One research university still publishes open grants defects three years after go-live, including no fix for erroneous salary-over-the-cap charges on faculty retro pay. In its own faculty survey, 39% of grant-dependent faculty applied for fewer grants because of the system and 59% had considered leaving.
Highest riskFaculty pay
A February 2026 legislative audit found 19 of 202 sampled faculty paid inaccurately with 38 more on expansion, 85 of 202 paid late by 17 to 364 days, and 737 faculty receiving no pay or partial pay in one term.
High riskStudent and financial aid
The module institutions defer or abandon. One flagship finished finance and HCM and walked away from Student. Another pushed it a full year over aid awarding. A third moved full implementation out by three years.
High riskStudent employment and time
Campus payroll is not corporate payroll. A student newspaper went two months unpaid because writers are paid per article and time tracking assumes clock-in and clock-out. Elsewhere student workers cannot correct their own timesheets.
ManageableCore finance and procurement
The part that usually lands. Worth saying out loud, because a program judged only on this looks healthier than it is.
High riskThe shadow system estate
One institution consolidated more than 800 financial systems. Another replaced nearly 80 student systems. These are not spreadsheets, they are load-bearing departmental applications with owners who did not attend your kickoff.

If your program plan spends equal effort across these six, it is mis-weighted. The two on the left take a third of the attention and produce most of the damage.

02The Five Decisions

Made early, usually quietly, and they set the outcome

Each one has a documented peer consequence. Nothing here needs clicking, because this page gets printed and taken into a committee.

Test the gap before you sign, not after

The room

Vendor selection. The demo covers the standard cases beautifully, and your hardest populations, multi-year faculty appointments, per-article student workers, split-funded research staff, are handled with a slide rather than a screen.

Make the vendor demonstrate your three hardest pay and appointment cases in a sandbox, and write what they cannot do into the contract before signature.

What the record shows

One state system's legislative auditor confirmed in February 2026 that the inability to calculate faculty payroll "was known during the request for proposals process" and the system proceeded anyway. Five years later it still runs a 1990s-era platform to compute faculty pay and feeds the new system downstream.

A named product limit from the same audit: assignments longer than 365 days could not be processed, so institutions ended appointments at one year and hand-calculated the remainder. That is a direct collision with how academic appointments work.

Take it to your programWhich of our hardest cases has anyone seen run, in a tenant, with our data?

Put research administration in the design room

The room

Grants gets scoped as a finance module. The people who live in it, principal investigators and research administrators, are consulted at training rather than at design, because they are the hardest group to get into a room.

Treat grants as its own program with its own named owner from research administration, not as a workstream inside finance.

What the record shows

Three months after one go-live, a Vice Provost for Research wrote to PIs that critical research capabilities were not fully functional, named audit risks and compliance violations as a concern, and moved the program from hypercare into extended transition support.

The mechanic underneath it is worth knowing: retro pay posts to the current costing allocation rather than the allocation in effect for the retro period, so every retro correction on a grant becomes a compliance cleanup through a payroll accounting adjustment.

Take it to your programWho from research administration has decision rights in design, by name?

Decide the student module honestly, early

The room

Student is the hardest module, the one with the least mature product history, and the one whose deadlines you do not control. It is also the one everyone wants to commit to in the business case, because it is the part that makes the program look ambitious.

Sequence Student on evidence, not ambition, and be willing to say in public that it is deferred. The institutions that did took the reputational hit once instead of quarterly.

What the record shows

One flagship completed finance and HCM and then walked away from Student entirely, on its second timeline. One university deferred a full year explicitly over financial aid awarding capability. One state system moved full implementation from 2026 to 2029.

And even at the top of the market, aid packaging often stays elsewhere: one institution spent $265 million and still bought a third-party financial aid product, having replaced roughly 80 legacy student systems.

Take it to your programWhat is our evidence that Student is ready for us, separate from the vendor roadmap?

Budget the run, not the build

The room

The business case carries license and implementation. It rarely carries what it costs to operate the platform in year three, which is the number that decides whether the deans support the program or campaign against it.

Put steady-state support cost in the business case at the start, with its funding source named, and show the deans the arithmetic before they discover it.

What the record shows

One private university publicly reported $23.8 million a year in support operations against a $5.7 million license, roughly four to one. It funds that from prorations the schools pay to the center, and those prorations rose four years running, roughly $200 million cumulatively.

The politics followed the money: students picketed a Faculty Senate Council meeting with signs reading "support workers, not Workday," in the same period as roughly 300 layoffs.

Take it to your programWhat is our year-three run cost, and which budget line absorbs it?

Own the historical record before you migrate

The room

Conversion scoping. Someone proposes limiting historical data to a few years to hold the schedule, which is a reasonable trade in most industries and a different thing entirely on a campus.

Decide the historical retention scope with the registrar and the research office in the room, and write down what will no longer be answerable.

What the record shows

A registrar cannot tell a 1994 graduate that their transcript did not survive the migration. That is the framing worth borrowing, because it converts an abstract conversion decision into an obligation the institution already carries.

The same logic applies to award history, effort certification, and service credit. Every one of them has a retention obligation attached that outlives the program, the vendor, and usually the people making the decision.

Take it to your programWhat questions will we no longer be able to answer after cutover, and who signed off on that?

03Your Seat

What those five mean for the chair you sit in

Campus governance means this page gets forwarded across a cabinet. Each seat's sharpest exposure, the early sign, and the one question worth asking this quarter.

CIO

The estate is bigger than the program

Peer institutions consolidated more than 800 financial systems and nearly 80 student systems. Those departmental applications have owners, budgets and workarounds, and they surface after go-live as either an integration or an outage. Meanwhile the implementation labor market is the real constraint: over a hundred campuses are live-in-flight against the same partner bench.

Early sign

No one can produce the departmental system inventory with a named owner per line.

Ask this quarterWhat is our full shadow system inventory, and who owns retirement of each one?

CFO

Two cost curves, both moving the wrong way

Run cost can reach several times license and it lands on the schools, which turns a systems decision into a governance fight. On the revenue side, high school graduates peaked in 2025 and decline through 2041, a 13% national drop, so the fall 2026 entering class is the first cohort on the downslope. Any business case built on flat enrollment is already wrong, and a Student program stretching to 2029 finishes inside a shrinking-revenue environment.

Early sign

The business case shows implementation cost and license, with no steady-state operating line.

Ask this quarterWhat does this platform cost to run in year three, and who pays for it?

Provost / VP Research

The faculty consequence is measurable

Grants damage shows up as behavior, not tickets: 39% of grant-dependent faculty at one institution applied for fewer grants and 59% had considered leaving. Federal rules moved underneath everyone too, with the de minimis indirect rate now 15% and the single audit threshold at $1,000,000, and an attempted 15% NIH indirect cap that was enjoined in 2025. Each of those is an F&A configuration change across an entire award portfolio, not a memo.

Early sign

F&A rates and MTDC exclusions live in reports rather than in configuration.

Ask this quarterCan we re-rate every open award without a manual project, and who has tested it?

04Dates That Do Not Move

Four items already on the calendar for 2026 and 2027

Statutory aid deadlines and tax changes do not negotiate with a program schedule. Each of these lands on a system while the institution is still converting.

2026-07-01 Grad PLUS eliminated, new borrowing limits live

A $257,500 lifetime limit takes effect the same day, with a three-year grandfather for current borrowers. Federal Student Aid system changes to support it landed 2026-04-26, which gave institutions roughly ten weeks to re-code packaging rules against a deadline they did not control.

Award year 2026-27 Parent PLUS capped at $65,000 per dependent student

Per student, not per parent, which is a different data structure than most aid systems carry today. New Pell eligibility for workforce programs lands in the same cycle.

Tax years from 2026 Tiered endowment excise tax replaces the flat rate

Effective for taxable years beginning after 2025-12-31, at 1.4%, 4% or 8% depending on endowment per student, with the applicability threshold raised to 3,000 tuition-paying students. The denominator comes out of the student system, so SIS data quality is now a tax exposure.

2026 through 2041 The enrollment downslope, already started

High school graduates peaked in 2025 and decline through 2041, 13% nationally, with 38 states below their 2023 level by 2041. Not a deadline, but it is the planning baseline every other number on this page sits inside.

The module that breaks is the one your faculty live in.

Six modules, ranked by what the peer record shows

Made early, usually quietly, and they set the outcome

Test the gap before you sign, not after

Put research administration in the design room

Decide the student module honestly, early

Budget the run, not the build

Own the historical record before you migrate

What those five mean for the chair you sit in

The estate is bigger than the program

Two cost curves, both moving the wrong way

The faculty consequence is measurable

Four items already on the calendar for 2026 and 2027

Five questions the peer audits keep answering too late

Which of the five is your program missing?