The College is moving from Student Academic Records and Human Resources (Sarah) to Workday, in a change that will alter how students select their courses, view academic records, and complete personal online tasks.
Course registration will move to Workday — a cloud-based enterprise resource-planning platform — starting with course selection for fall 2027. Workday will replace all functions of Sarah — the College’s installation of PeopleSoft, a human resources platform.
According to Jessie Mandel, director of project and change management in the Office for Information Technology (OIT), the College’s move to Workday will address issues with the PeopleSoft platform, which, since being implemented by the College in the early 2000s, has become outdated. Workday is currently used by Amherst, Bowdoin, and Hamilton.
Academic functions will be transitioned slowly to the new platform, according to Mandel. In October 2026, OIT, the Registrar’s Office, and faculty will begin to upload course information so that students can view and select courses for registration on Workday. The final step before the platform can go live will come in summer 2027, when Student Financial Services will transfer their activities to Workday, Mandel wrote in an email to the Record.
The College began to use Workday in July 2024, when the HR and Finance systems switched to the platform, impacting students with jobs. As OIT Documentation and Training Specialist Daelyn Bentley-Gottel explained to students at a presentation on Feb. 26, the College made this change to consolidate the different elements of its online administration onto one platform.
Workday will include a full course catalog, as well as a search and filter tool to allow students to more easily search for courses. Students will also be able to construct and view their potential course schedules. Advising holds, which prevent students from selecting courses if they have not met with their academic advisor, and financial holds, which prevent students with an outstanding balance from signing up for courses and housing, will also be processed through Workday, Bentley-Gottel added.
The pre-registration process will also look different under Workday. Classes will be listed as “open” or as having a “waitlist.” With Workday, faculty can create waitlists that prioritize certain types of students, for example, those with a certain class year or major.
Registrar Alan Hatton said he expects the waitlist feature to catch on quickly. “The ability to maintain waitlists in Workday is a feature that we expect faculty to use heavily,” he wrote in an email to the Record. “This feature allows students to express interest in courses that require faculty review because demand exceeds capacity.” Currently, there is no consistent system for course waitlists across departments. Some departments create centralized lists of students hoping to take a particular course, while other departments leave the creation of a waitlist system up to the faculty.
The Workday website will also house academic records, according to Bentley-Gottel. This page will contain progress reports and track general education and major requirements.
From an OIT perspective, Mandel also sees Workday as a better platform because its data is not stored locally, whereas Sarah is run out of the data center in Jesup. “Workday is cloud-based, which gives the college much better disaster recovery and business continuity,” she wrote.
