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Ellucian earns EDUCAUSE Higher Ed Ready(TM) designation. Sep 28, 2026, 12:15 ET Key Highlights: * Ellucian is the only higher ed student information system (SIS) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) provider to earn the EDUCAUSE Higher Ed Ready(TM) designation. * The recognition follows an independent assessment by higher education CIOs and academic technology leaders across six areas of organizational readiness. * The designation reinforces Ellucian's singular focus on higher education and mission to power higher education so institutions can empower student success. RESTON, Va., Sept. 28, 2026 /PRNewswire/ - Ellucian, the leading higher education technology solutions provider, today announced it has earned the EDUCAUSE Higher Ed Ready(TM) designation, becoming the only higher education SIS and ERP provider to receive the recognition. The EDUCAUSE Higher Ed Ready(TM) Program provides a trusted, third-party assessment recognizing companies that demonstrate strong commitment, transparency, and service to the higher education community. Independent Validation of Higher Education Readiness Higher education relies on solutions providers that understand its mission, constraints, and responsibility to students, faculty, and staff. Organizations earning the EDUCAUSE Higher Ed Ready(TM) designation are evaluated by a panel of higher education CIOs and academic technology leaders across six areas: transparency and communication; innovation; customer success; shared goals and values; standards and compliance; and collaboration and community engagement. For institutions, the designation signals credibility, alignment with higher education's unique needs and priorities, and long-term partnership potential. "We're honored to earn the EDUCAUSE Higher Ed Ready(TM) designation," said Laura Ipsen, President and CEO, Ellucian. "For 60 years, higher education has been our singular focus. That deep domain expertise gives us a unique understanding of the complexities, responsibilities, and opportunities institutions navigate every day and enables us to translate that insight into technology and partnership that help them thrive. This recognition reinforces what has always been fundamental to our mission: powering higher education so institutions can empower student success." Purpose-Built Innovation for Higher Education Ellucian's unmatched higher education expertise is embedded in the Ellucian Platform and Ellucian Student, higher education's complete SaaS-native solution powering the end-to-end student lifecycle. This continued innovation helps institutions navigate complexity, improve outcomes, and prepare for what comes next. * Higher education intelligence: Ellucian AI is powered by the Ellucian Higher Education Knowledge Graph, a living catalog of approximately 10,000 unique higher education processes informed by more than 50 years of expertise and continuously evolving alongside colleges and universities. * AI that understands institutional context: Purpose-built AI applies higher education-specific business logic, policies, regulations, and workflows to deliver actionable intelligence while maintaining institutional governance and control. * A unified foundation for student success: Ellucian Student brings student, HCM (Human Capital Management), and Finance together on the Ellucian Platform, aligning people, resources, and decisions around a single vision: to unlock learning for all. WHAT IS ELLUCIAN Ellucian powers innovation for higher education, partnering with approximately 3,000 customers across 50 countries, serving more than 21 million students. Ellucian's AI-powered platform, trained on the richest dataset available in higher education, drives efficiency, personalized experiences, and strengthened engagement for all students, faculty and staff. Fueled by decades of experience with a singular focus on the unique needs of learning institutions, the Ellucian platform features best-in-class SaaS capabilities and delivers insights needed now and into the future. These solutions and services span the entire student lifecycle, including data-rich tools for student recruitment, enrolment, and retention to workforce analytics, fundraising, and alumni engagement. Ellucian's innovative solutions, vast ecosystem of partners and user community of more than 45,000 provides best practices leading to greater institutional success and achieving better student outcomes. Media Contacts SOURCE Ellucian

New HEPI and Ellucian Policy Note 'Risk and Resilience: What UK higher education can learn from the United States' * Author: - Dan Greenstein * Published: - 24 September 2026 Financial pressure does not become a crisis because of one bad year or one isolated problem. A new Policy Note from HEPI, partnered with Ellucian, draws on lessons from the United States to show how interconnected problems can push universities into decline, and what UK institutions can learn about spotting and reversing those trends. In Risk and Resilience: What UK higher education can learn from the United States (Policy Note 76), Dan Greenstein (former Chancellor of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education) identifies seven lessons for UK higher education from the experience of American institutions. Central to the analysis is an unusual feature of the English system: universities depend heavily on student fees, leaving them exposed when demand falls, but have limited control over the price they can charge. Greenstein argues that this leaves institutions carrying 'private-sector exposure at public-sector speed', while headline sector averages can obscure the financial trajectories of individual universities. The Policy Note argues that institutions rarely run into serious difficulty because of a single problem. Falling recruitment, weaker retention, declining revenue, reduced cash generation and an inability to invest can instead reinforce one another. Drawing on examples of recovery in the US, Greenstein argues that cost-cutting alone cannot reverse this trajectory: institutions that successfully recovered acted on revenue as well as costs. The paper also explores the importance of student retention, international recruitment and shared services, while highlighting the particularly limited financial levers available to universities in Scotland and Northern Ireland. With universities across the UK confronting difficult decisions about their financial futures, the paper offers lessons from institutions that have already faced similar pressures, and considers what successful recovery looks like in practice. Click here to read the press release and find a download link to the full report.

35-Year partnership drives growth and Innovation. Oral Roberts University modernizes with Ellucian Student powered by Banner to improve the student experience and prepare for future innovation. Oral Roberts University needed to align campus systems to support continued enrollment growth, deliver a seamless student experience, and lay the foundation for future innovation. * Ellucian Student powered by Banner provides a scalable SaaS foundation designed to support AI-powered capabilities and continuous innovation. * The Ellucian Platform streamlines campus operations through business process automation and a mobile-friendly central workspace. * Reducing repetitive data entry for students and accelerating completion time in key areas like registration and financial aid. * Simplifying and personalizing the student experience with instant access to services, information, and daily tasks. * Allocating more time to innovation planning and AI experimentation. reduction in student registration process time improved processes through six new platform tools We are elated with the SaaS model. We probably just took a three-to-five-year jump ahead of everybody because we made the decision early. That differentiates ORU and gives us a jump start on innovating with AI." Michael Mathews, Vice President of Global Learning and Innovation Three decades of growth, innovation, and partnership. Over the last 35 years, Oral Roberts University and Ellucian have conquered each new technological advancement together. Today, that partnership continues to flourish with the institution's SaaS modernization project and the rapidly expanding adoption of artificial intelligence. Located in Tulsa, Oklahoma, ORU serves more than 7,500 students across traditional, online, and hybrid programs. Celebrating 17 consecutive years of enrollment growth, the university has an ambitious goal to reach 10,000 students in the next few years by continuing to deliver a personalized, modern experience. Understanding that today's students expect the same intuitive technology they encounter in every other part of their lives, ORU leadership knew outdated processes could quickly become barriers to enrollment and student success. "When students visit a campus and they can't do things on their mobile phones and smart watches, it's not much of a smart experience," said Michael Mathews, Vice President for Global Learning and Innovation at ORU. "We've got to be clear leaders in this area to continue enrollment growth and stay competitive." Transforming together as a unified campus. ORU selected Ellucian Student to modernize their campus with a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) foundation, enabling the university to accelerate student tasks, improve administrative processes, and prepare for continuous innovation. "With this modernization project, we're really looking to enhance the efficiency, security, and accessibility of our systems," said Terry Kollmorgen, General Counsel and Chair of the modernization project at ORU. "We said let's embrace this challenge, because if we pull back or resist, it's only going to be more difficult. And to the credit of our people, they have embraced it exceedingly well." Change management and proactive communication remained central from the start. The project included a task force of department leaders from across campus and 18 modernization champions from those departments to build a feedback bridge between the project team and the functional users. "SaaS modernization is not an IT project," Mathews said. "The IT is already running. It was running within three weeks. The truth is, it's really the business processes and getting people to understand and adopt." Together, the task force identified five major objectives for the project: Enhance security and disaster recovery, improve business processes, strengthen data utilization and collaboration, establish ORU as a leader in educational technology, and bolster student engagement and satisfaction. Students as the north star. Throughout the modernization effort, one objective stood out as the guiding principle: Improve the student experience. "One of the things the president said to us with respect to a governing principle was he wants this project to look at every decision and ask what's best for the student," Kollmorgen said. The team began benchmarking against the best student enrollment processes in higher education to uncover opportunities for improvement, such as minimizing keystrokes and clicks, reducing repetitive data entry and making the experience aesthetically appealing. Capabilities delivered through the Ellucian Platform, including business process automation and a mobile, customizable central workspace called MyORU, allowed ORU to turn these benchmarks into reality. Using business process automation within student forms, for example, staff can reuse data and reduce the number of times a student is asked to enter it. Meanwhile, the student's new central workspace makes it easy to access these forms, even on the go. "We've never had a mobile app for Banner," Kollmorgen said. "Now on a smartphone and smartwatch we'll be able to do that. It's going to be a game changer for our students." Moving to a modernized central workspace not only unlocked mobile access, but it also gave students faster, more direct pathways to their most common tasks. The sleek new visual entryway eliminates clicks and accelerates process completion, even for complex processes like registration. One experiment showed a 70% reduction in registration completion time with SaaS capabilities. "We had one of our student workers register for three classes, both in the old on-prem system and in the new SaaS system, and it went from 10 minutes to three minutes," Mathews said. "That doesn't sound like a big deal, but it becomes a big deal when you do the math." Building a Foundation for AI. Improving business processes and efficiency was always one of the main objectives for the modernization project. Leadership believes that leveraging these efficiencies will improve ORU's ability to support students and free up time to focus on supporting innovation. Staff in Financial Aid proved this to be true, cutting completion time for one key process from six days down to 45 minutes - a significant reduction for staff and students. "We will no longer have to do financial aid upgrades on a weekend," Mathews said. "The more operational activity that we get automated, the more time we will have to experiment with AI-related activities across the campus." With a modern SaaS foundation in place, the university is expanding its work around AI governance, institutional innovation, and new approaches to student success. A cross-functional AI task force is in place, and leadership is exploring plans for an AI Institute that will prepare graduates for an AI-enabled workforce. "We are elated with the SaaS model," Mathews said. "We probably just took a three-to-five-year jump ahead of everybody because we made the decision early. That differentiates ORU and gives us a jump start on innovating with AI." ORU's long-standing partnership with Ellucian continues to evolve alongside the university's ambitions. What began more than three decades ago as a Student Information System (SIS) partnership has become a strategic relationship supporting modernization, operational transformation, and future innovation. "I've done nine ERP/SIS transformations in my career and this has been the smoothest," Mathews said. "You start to realize that it's not about the technology. It's about the processes and the people and transforming the right way."