The Total Economic Impact™ Of Ellucian Colleague SaaS

Cost Savings From Transition To The Cloud

Evidence and data. Interviewees highlighted several benefits and improvements from transitioning their on-premises SIS to Ellucian Colleague SaaS. They reported saving money by reducing IT infrastructure and maintenance costs, eliminating on-premises servers and related software licenses, and reducing the need for disaster recovery infrastructure. While some interviewees highlighted the staff reduction potential, most emphasized their ability to reallocate resources toward strategic initiatives.

• After moving their SIS from on-premises to SaaS, one CIO discussed the ultimate value Colleague SaaS delivers to their team: “We reduced or eliminated many of the contracts and applications related to our old SIS. Our long-term storage, computing, and data center expenses will decrease as more applications move to the cloud. SaaS is not less expensive, but it allows you to focus on being a strategic partner to the business rather than working around the clock to keep the lights on.”
• Another CIO said that they were able to reduce IT infrastructure costs after adopting their cloud strategy: “We reduced our server room footprint by two-thirds and eliminated a giant lever air conditioner where [energy costs were expensive] down to some energy-efficient, smaller air-conditioning units. Our next server rack will be just a 5U server, which is nothing. The bigger savings come with the disaster recovery strategy because we don’t have to run a mirrored site, and our uptime is much better. Compared to the outages we had when it was on-prem when we were constantly fighting fires, the uptime is priceless.”
• The same CIO also discussed how moving to Colleague SaaS kept their software current and protected against institutional knowledge loss when IT professionals left the organization: “We were using the core features of on-prem Colleague, and we were at the point where our infrastructure was aging out. We needed to look at alternatives to replace our server infrastructure. We also had one IT member who seemed to have all the knowledge, but he could retire at any point, and ’he was the only one who could run our systems. Now we have a more robust infrastructure and can employ third-party services to enhance and get more value out of the product.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following for the composite organization:

• The composite removes eight servers that previously ran Colleague on-premises, including those used for disaster recovery.
• Annual IT infrastructure costs include servers ($5,000 per server); network costs ($750 per server); maintenance costs ($4,500 per server); software costs ($2,500 per server); software maintenance costs ($1,500 per server); and expenses for server and network power, cooling, and facilities (estimated at $7,200 per server).
• According to Ellucian, the annual cost of the on-premises version of Colleague is $300,000.
• Total IT infrastructure cost savings excluding labor are $471,600 per year.
• The composite organization previously needed two FTEs to administer the on-premises IT infrastructure.
• After deploying Colleague SaaS, 95% of employees’ time is recaptured and repurposed for work on other tasks and initiatives.
• The average fully burdened annual salary of a generalized IT professional is $135,200.

Risks. Forrester recognizes that these results may not be representative of all experiences. Factors that may impact this benefit include:

• The institution’s legacy IT infrastructure costs.
• The amount and compensation of internal labor required to manage this IT infrastructure.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of more than $1.6 million.

Business Employee Labor Cost Savings

Evidence and data. Ellucian Colleague SaaS was designed specifically for higher education institutions. Its automated workflows and self-service workspaces provide real-time reporting while streamlining administrative and academic processes like student lifecycle management, financial aid, and human resources. The interviewees highlighted several examples of how Colleague SaaS, which includes Ellucian Insights and Ellucian Experience, created efficiencies for different administrative functions and departments so that staff could focus on more strategic initiatives.

• The director of IT explained how a simple change of address entry previously required separate, manual updates to the business office, financial aid, or HR systems. They said, “These small changes save time, especially when running a report and finding one person with three different addresses, requiring the right one to be identified.” The CIO from the same institution said: “When a customer updates their address at the registrar’s office, they expect the institution to reflect the change everywhere. They don’t know that three other systems must be updated. There was a learning curve for our business users, but in the long run, having all the data in one place will serve our students better. Colleague is the authoritative source around campus; now we have a true system of record.”
• Another CIO provided numerous examples of Ellucian’s impact on various departments. They highlighted that the financial aid team, initially hesitant, emerged as the campus champion post-implementation. The CIO illustrated the team’s transformation: “They do everything. We thought they would need us to create their new roles, but they do it themselves. They’re self-sufficient now, and we rarely hear from them.”
  
  The CIO further described Ellucian’s impact on other departments: “The registrar has embraced it and is refining their processes. Our institutional effectiveness team, which is part of our registrar’s area, took over student reporting, so people ’don’t come to us anymore; they go to them. On the faculty side, we have better integration with our learning management system now, which helped tremendously. More departments are taking on reporting instead of relying on IT, which is a significant improvement. We never really had an HR system before; we only had payroll. We were also able to go electronic in more ways. For example, budget officers used to have to wait for paper reports to come around, and now they can log into the system and see where they stand with their budgets at any given time.”
• The director of IT described Colleague SaaS as a big win for the student registration process, especially after attempts to create a class registration waitlist with their previous solution failed: “After moving to Colleague, [the team] piloted a select group of classes to ensure it would work the way we expected it to and that the registrar’s office was ready to do it, and we did it! It’s more straightforward for students. It used to be, ‘Okay, here’s your piece of paper. Find that faculty member anywhere on campus. Now, find your advisor. Return it to the registrar’s office, and we will email you if you can get into that class.’ Now, we have streamlined the process.”

• Some of the interviewees’ colleagues used Ellucian Insights to create customized reports and mine data for insights. Integrated information from different departments provided teams with a comprehensive view of overall performance, helping staff and faculty make more informed decisions. One CIO discussed using Insights to run HR reports on employee longevity, gender distribution, and educational backgrounds to create and rank position classifications. Additionally, the business office team benefited from improved reporting capabilities, which allowed them to easily visualize departmental expenditure and income. According to the interviewee: “Insights can tag essentially any data that comes in through a third-party database. We can see the expenditures and income of different departments very graphically. It’s just nice to be able to keep digging down into these pie charts to see where the money is going.”
• The VP of IT described how their business office led the charge, moving all of their budgeting, purchasing, requisitions, and check requests to Colleague. They noted: “Budget officers used to get a report mailed to them at the end of every month. The report was out of date as soon as the ink hit the paper. Budget owners had no idea where they were financially, so they kept spreadsheets and files, while others didn’t even care about staying within budget. Now, we have many more restrictions, allowing us to stay within the boundaries of our policies. The business office tracks purchases now, so it’s easier to audit. It’s made a huge difference. We have a paper trail that we didn’t have before. We see a lot more spending control and less skirting the system. Our institution has had a balanced budget for 65-plus years straight. This aids that balanced budget because we know where our numbers stand in real time.”
• The VP of IT described combining Ellucian Insights with Ellucian Experience to set up a centralized hub of campus resources for students and staff. They shared: “I wanted there to be one place you go to on campus to find everything you need. It was easy to set up so that only the right people could access the necessary systems. This made it simple for users because we’re driving everybody to this one place instead of them having to maintain a list of 14 links in their browser.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• The institution has four financial aid professionals who each spend 960 hours per year running reports to keep up to date with financial aid information.
• After deploying Colleague SaaS and Ellucian Insights, the time they spend running reports is reduced by 85%, saving the financial aid professionals a total of 3,264 hours.
• Professionals in the registrar’s office spend 2 hours per 2,500 students running reports annually.
• After deploying Colleague SaaS and Ellucian Insights, the time they spend running reports is reduced by 85%, saving professionals in the registrar’s office a total of 4,250 hours.
• The composite organization has 250 faculty members who each spend 140 hours registering, scheduling, and grading per year.
• After deploying Colleague SaaS, the time they spend on these activities is reduced by 75%, saving faculty members a total of 26,250 hours.
• There are 20 finance and HR professionals who each year spend 100 hours running reports such as finance reporting, student billing, and HR.
• After deploying Colleague SaaS and Ellucian Insights, the time they spend on these activities is reduced by 90%, saving these finance and HR professionals a total of 1,800 hours.
• The fully burdened hourly rate for faculty and staff is $65.
• Of the time saved across all of these departments, Forrester conservatively estimates that 50% is recaptured for work on other tasks and initiatives and is therefore included in the benefit calculation.

Risks. Factors that may impact business employee labor cost savings include:

• The number and compensation of employees involved in the activities described.
• Their prior state of efficiency. These time savings can be even greater for users who more proficiently leverage Colleague SaaS and Ellucian Insights.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of more than $2.6 million.

IT Employee Labor Cost Savings

Evidence and data. Interviewees emphasized how moving Colleague to a cloud-based solution enabled their IT staff to shift focus from maintaining outdated systems, pushing upgrades, and coding process changes to becoming strategic partners to education colleagues. The interviewees underscored how they were able to maintain and enhance their systems without adding additional staff and, in some cases, chose not to replace the headcount that left the institution.

• One CIO told Forrester: “Our IT people who had to do the [legacy system] maintenance thanked me 100 times because now their focus doesn’t have to be on upgrades. Their focus can be on functionality, helping end users, and improving the student experience.” They continued: “Every morning, for the financial teams, we would have to run an access program to pull in student information from [the legacy system] and move it to another, which took probably an hour. They don’t have to do that anymore. That’s 1 hour every day that somebody doesn’t have to run a [database management program].”
• The director of IT explained: “We’re one full-time staff member short on our systems team right now. We had a retirement after the project’, but instead of worrying about how we will manage [manual reporting and data transfers], now that we’re in Colleague, we are thinking about how we can automate and make that process better.”
• Another CIO reinforced how their team had shifted its focus to work more closely with the business. They said that while job titles didn’t change, the team was acting more like business analysts than programmers or database administrators (DBAs). “We were fighting fires. We were doing upgrades. We were doing updates. We stayed up in the middle of the night to do things so we didn’t affect the business. And then, we worked on projects in the little time we had left. I have five staff. Before Ellucian, we might have run two projects simultaneously. Now, we’re running 10 projects at once, and we have the bandwidth to do that because we’re not fighting fires all the time, especially our DBA who was maintaining the SQL servers. Now, my DBA is focused more on helping with reporting, analytics, and things that are more directly helping the business itself and not just maintaining back-end servers.”
• A third CIO noted: “I had 21 on the IT team in 2018, and now ’we have 12. If we were still running, maintaining, and needing to upgrade that on-premises solution, we’d be at a breaking point now. It’s afforded us the ability to operate leaner and smaller. There’s certainly less to worry about for security, uptime, and all of those things on the infrastructure side.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• The institution’s IT team has two developers who spend 160 hours per month working on custom code changes and other related activities.
• After deploying Colleague SaaS, the time they spend on these activities is reduced by 95%, saving these developers a total of 3,648 hours per year.
• Six IT professionals spend 100 hours per month working on maintenance required for the student information system infrastructure.
• After deploying Colleague SaaS, Ellucian Insights, and Ellucian Experience, the time they spend on these activities is reduced by 80%, saving these professionals 5,760 hours per year.
• The average fully burdened hourly rate for IT staff is $65.
• Forrester conservatively estimates that 50% of the total time saved per IT professional is recaptured for work on other tasks and initiatives and is therefore included in the benefit calculation.
• The composite is also able to eliminate the need to backfill an IT professional upon their retirement, saving $120,000 per year.

Risks. Factors that may impact IT employee labor cost savings include:

• The number and compensation of employees involved in the activities described.
• Their prior state of efficiency.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of more than $1.2 million.

Increased Profit

Evidence and data. Student retention has a significant impact on educational institutions’ bottom lines and was of high concern to the interviewees. In a study conducted by Sallie Mae in 2022, 64% of enrolled undergraduate students reported that they were on course to complete their undergraduate degree; 12% considered leaving school; and 24% were “at risk,” either having seriously considered leaving school or at risk of being asked to leave school.³

Interviewees discussed how Ellucian’s Colleague SaaS, which includes Insights, helped improve student retention by offering advanced data analytics, streamlined administrative processes, and a more modern user experience. The interviewees’ institutions were able to identify at-risk students earlier and more efficiently, improve academic advising through better access to comprehensive student data, and make administrative tasks like class registration more accessible to students. Additionally, the platform facilitated program enrollment analysis, allowing the institutions to adjust their academic programs based on student needs and interests.

• According to the CAO: “Ellucian Colleague integrates well with [the payment gateway] that we use. It’s one of the premier partners for Ellucian. If we can reduce friction for students paying their bills, that’s always a good thing. The self-service module for students has a really good summary screen of their bill, accepted aid, anticipated aid, projected cost, and things like that. That has made it a lot easier for students to access, and they’re starting to think, ‘Oh, I should go check self-service before I get upset about something.’ That’s been useful.”
• The interviewee added that their previous SIS never worked with their single sign-on, and the separate SIS login that students needed introduced friction. “Now, everything’s fully integrated with our single sign-on. If they need to go in and check something or pay a bill, they click one button, they’re logged in, they can see their bill, and they can pay it.”
• A CIO explained that measuring program success encompassed both ends of the student journey. One aspect included how many students joined and successfully matriculated through a certain program, while the other included retention and duration. They said: “We’re measuring individual student journeys and how long they take. Do they finish on time? Do they finish a few months late? Are they finishing very late or not finishing and graduating at all? If they graduate, are they graduating with the degree they intended to get, or are they transferring to something else at a certain point?”
• The VP of IT told Forrester: “I do think it makes it easier for our students to do what they need. Ellucian integrates much better with [our learning management system]. The integration between those two is great. And as soon as the kid registers — boom! They’re in their online class, and they can get their information when it opens up. Overall, they have a better, more modern experience, which is going to affect them both coming and staying.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• Using data from Ellucian Insights, the composite organization creates four new courses and enrolls 45 students for each at a rate of $12,000 per course, per year.
• Ellucian Insights is assigned 20% credit for the development of this new revenue stream.
• There are 2,500 students enrolled at the institution who pay an average of $31,268 for tuition and fees after scholarships and grants.
• The percentage of students who drop out before four years is 28%.
• After deploying Colleague SaaS, Ellucian Insights, and Ellucian Experience, the dropout rate declines 5% as the student experience improves. This decline is due to various factors enabled by the Colleague, Insights, and Experience platforms such as easily accessible advising, improved transparency around billing and financial aid, and more attractive course and program offerings.
• The operating margin for the composite organization is 10%.

Risks. Factors that may impact the value of increased profit include:

• The institution’s size in terms of revenue and operating margin.
• Its past retention history.
• Its ability to improve the student experience through the Ellucian Experience platform.
• Its ability to create and attract students to new courses and educational program opportunities using data from Ellucian Insights.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of $342,000.

Avoided Cybersecurity-Related Costs

Evidence and data. Interviewees said deploying Colleague SaaS significantly bolstered their security efforts. By shifting responsibility for security management to Ellucian, the interviewees’ institutions benefited from  its advanced security measures and expertise, which included regular updates, patches, and robust monitoring. The move to Ellucian’s cloud-based solutions improved the institutions’ disaster recovery and business continuity posture while reducing the need for additional security staffing. Ellucian’s centralized security management controls simplified report production and documentation, streamlining compliance and auditing processes. The transition to the cloud not only enhanced the institutions’ data and systems security but also afforded the interviewees peace of mind knowing their infrastructure was safeguarded by Ellucian’s comprehensive security protocols.

• One CIO admitted that their institution had fallen behind on investing in security measures and was thankful Ellucian provided this service: “We weren’t doing certain things as a university due to our budget, ignoring some security measures and hoping for the best. Now with Ellucian, it’s actually getting covered. Our experience has been that when known vulnerabilities have come out, Ellucian patches them way faster than we ever would have.” The interviewee continued: “Cybersecurity is a big piece [of the puzzle], and having Ellucian at the front of that provides peace of mind. We still have responsibilities, but they’re taking on a heavy load of that. At the end of the day, what sold us was the idea of having a stable and secure system.”
• The CAO noted that outsourcing platform security to Ellucian saved their institution from needing to attract security professionals to their rural campus. They explained: “We are a relatively small university of roughly 2,500 students. We are in a rural and relatively economically depressed area. One of the things we perpetually struggle with is attracting workforce talent and being able to pay them enough. Information security is a pretty big concern. It’s really expensive to hire full-time security professionals. By going with SaaS, we were able to essentially outsource a lot of that security work to Ellucian, which is maintaining and securing our instance. Staffing and security were two major benefits for us.”
• A director of IT liked the stronger controls over electronic records that Ellucian provided: “There’s a newer way of controlling a student’s record and restricting access. The registrar’s office has gone all paperless — they used to have tons of filing cabinets. The filing cabinets are all empty now. They’re totally electronic with regard to the student record.”

Modeling and assumptions. Based on the interviews, Forrester assumes the following about the composite organization:

• By deploying Colleague SaaS, the composite organization avoids having to recruit and hire a security professional.
• A recruiter would normally spend 30 hours hiring an information security professional.
• The fully burdened hourly rate for a recruiter is $57.
• The composite avoids an average fully burdened annual salary for an information security professional of $170,000.
• The composite organization also reduces its exposure to cyberattacks through Ellucian’s security measures.
• According to Forrester research, the likelihood of experiencing one or more breaches in a year is 63%, at a mean cumulative cost of $2,140,000. External sources are the point of origin for 63% of breaches.⁴
• After deploying Colleague SaaS, Ellucian Insights, and Ellucian Experience, 70% of the composite organization’s systems are covered by Ellucian’s security protocols, so the annual risk exposure addressable with Ellucian is $588,894.
• The reduced risk of breaches from external attacks attributable to Ellucian is 80%.

Risks. Factors that may impact the financial benefit associated with avoided security costs include:

• The prior state and maturity level of the organization’s security operations, including security tools and processes in place.
• The extent of coverage provided by the Ellucian platform.
• The volume and type of data breached.

Results. To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 10%, yielding a three-year, risk-adjusted total PV (discounted at 10%) of more than $1.4 million.

Unquantified Benefits

Interviewees mentioned the following additional benefits that their organizations experienced but were not able to quantify:

• The opportunity to modernize practices. Prior to implementing Colleague SaaS, one interviewee’s institution questioned whether it was truly adhering to best practices. Adopting Colleague SaaS forced them to ask hard questions and reevaluate their processes. According to the CIO: “We have a system of sister schools where we all work closely together. We were all doing things differently, and we had already been asking ourselves, ‘Why are we doing things the way we do when others are doing them differently?’ When [Colleague] SaaS came along to force that conversation, we saw it as an opportunity to really look at our processes and reevaluate.”
• An improved student experience. Interviewees called out several areas where the student experience had improved. According to the CAO: “Anytime we were advising students on their progress and degrees, we had to print out a sheet of paper from our catalog and mark it up by hand. That really hurt our graduation rates and our time to completion for degrees. Switching to Colleague SaaS has enabled our students to, at any point, log into self-service and see what they have taken, what they need to take, and when it is going to be offered. They can even do ‘what-if’ scenarios. ‘If I change my major to X, how much more time would that add?’ That made advising exponentially better because the system is doing things that systems ought to do. That has been one of the biggest immediate wins.”
  
  A CIO noted how the self-service feature of the Ellucian Experience hub contributed to an enhanced student experience: “The Experience self-service portal gives students a much better experience interacting with us from a technical perspective. They can see a degree audit that’s accurate, register for classes themselves, plan their courses, pay their bills directly, and see their financial aid in a better way than they could before. It just works. It looks better. It’s more modern.”
• A single source of truth. Standardizing with Ellucian’s platform gave interviewees’ institutions a singular focal point through which campuswide data could be controlled and accessed. A CIO explained: “In the long run, having all the data in one place is going to serve our students much better in ways that maybe we don’t even understand at times. When updating somebody’s email address or name, we can change it in one spot, and it changes essentially everywhere else. So now we really have a true system of record. It saves us time troubleshooting. It saves us time fixing problems because we don’t have to ask, ‘Where else is it going to be broken?’ We just know it’s going to be fixed everywhere and we’re good to go.”
  
  The VP of IT noted: “In our old system, we never could get the registrar to believe the degree plan was close enough. In the new degree plan that’s built into Colleague, the process for verifying graduation is better. It helps the advisors see exactly what a student needs to make progress toward graduating. They can plan their schedules with a student, and it makes for a smoother, better experience. So much of this ties back to the fact that it’s a much more modern experience than what they had before. It also gives a level of comfort to the advisor and the student as they’re planning for the future.”
• Thorough service and support. Interviewees appreciated the support provided by Ellucian, particularly during implementation. According to a CIO: “The people that we worked with at Ellucian — their consultants, project manager, even the sales team — they really listened to us. We were partners in the whole thing. Even today, I feel like I’m a partner with Ellucian.” Another CIO confirmed this, adding: “We had Ellucian’s full resources at our disposal to help. We really did have a rock star team for project management.”
• Support from the Ellucian community. Interviewees also appreciated the support and camaraderie at the Ellucian Live event and from the broader community of Ellucian customers, including fellow educators. One CIO explained: “We used to spend all our time making systems or integrations work. We weren’t looking at the system and asking, ‘How can we make it better?’ Now we have [the Ellucian] community that we can bounce ideas off of, and I can find documentation on how to do something and get the support that we need from the company, from other users, from colleagues, and from outside our institution. Now that we’re in Colleague, we’re able to take our IT staff’s time and focus on other things like process improvement or automation.”

Flexibility

The value of flexibility is unique to each customer. There are multiple scenarios in which a customer might implement Colleague SaaS and later realize additional uses and business opportunities, including:

• Implementing additional Ellucian modules. Interviewees discussed their plans to expand the Ellucian platform to other departments and functions. According to the director of IT, “Now that we’re live on Colleague, one of our goals is to get the academic plan [features] working for our students.” Likewise, the CAO noted: “We still have a couple modules coming online now. … We are trying to move away from physical IT infrastructure on campus whenever we can.” A CIO told Forrester: “We’re pretty excited about the potential of Insights. That may be our next data warehouse home. It’s something we’re evaluating currently. Advise CRM is also something that we are still evaluating.”
• Mining data from Ellucian Insights. One CIO discussed making greater use of Ellucian Insights for improved decision-making: “We’ve created a program enrollment dashboard, and we are able to see the cost for a student for every program and certificate, if they’re making money, and what the enrollment is, so if these departments don’t have X enrollment or are aren’t making X amount of money, they go on a watchlist. We’re able to see if it is still worth it to the college to keep it going. The administration loves it. It’s game-changing.”
• Consolidating IT operations. While interviewees noted that Colleague SaaS’s increased visibility into expenses had reduced the incidence of budget overruns, they still looked for opportunities to reduce costs. A CIO told Forrester, “Something that we need to be looking forward to is where we have an overlap in toolsets.” The CAO added: “Prior to moving into Colleague, our invoicing submission for reimbursement was done using [an e-signature platform] as a workflow tool. This subscription was costing us roughly $60,000 a year, and these costs were going to increase by 50% in the future. Now all of that basic workflow and approval functionality happens within the Colleague finance module. We recovered probably $30,000 to $40,000 eliminating [the tool] for basic approval workflows.”

Flexibility could also be quantified when evaluated as part of a specific project (described in more detail in Appendix A).