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California-based Workday, which specialises in human resource management software, has launched its new student engagement platform, dubbed Workday Student, in Australia this month.
The product harnesses artificial intelligence and was developed with input from 40 universities around the world and a local advisory board, including Melbourne University, Macquarie University and the University of Auckland.
The platform is designed to reduce student attrition, improve the student experience and improve the university’s reputation by eradicating legacy and paper-based systems.
Underscoring the scale of the problem, Workday head of education for Australia and New Zealand Cade Elg said he visited a university in Melbourne recently and found it had to complete structural works to accommodate the amount of paper-based files.
“They had to work with their engineering team to reinforce the floor because of the amount of paper they were still processing and this is very much in the internet era where there is tooling available that simply doesn’t require that,” Mr Elg said.
University of Melbourne remains Australia’s highest ranked university.
He also said it added unnecessary cost to universities when they were facing funding challenges and debate about a cap on lucrative international students.
“Funding for universities is always a major challenge, and there is a huge cost burden involved in the administration and the manual processing of those paper forms of having really disconnected and clunky systems,” Mr Elg said.
“And so while we do have a very strong position that Workday Student will uplift the experience for students, we’ve also seen a huge reduction in costs for our customers using this system as well, once they remove their legacy systems and manual processes it allows a lot of their staff to focus on a lot more strategic work, rather than processing paper.”
The Times Higher Education world university rankings 2025, released in October, revealed that 17 Australian universities slipped backwards this year.
The University of Melbourne is Australia’s highest-ranked university for the 15th consecutive year – but fell two places to be ranked 39 out of 2860 universities worldwide. Monash University, Australia’s second-highest ranked institution, fell four places to 58. The University of Sydney was ranked at 61 – its worst performance since 2018, under the leadership of embattled vice-chancellor Professor Mark Scott.
The University of Sydney has suffered its worst performance since 2018.
“Another key metric for universities in Australia is around retention, which we see a lot of key challenges in right now - the students are coming into the system and for various reasons, taking a long time to complete their studies and get their degree, but many are just dropping out completely,” Mr Elg said.
“We see technology being a major barrier for the student experience, but also in enabling institutions to better advise and support those students and put in some mechanisms in place that might help keep those students inside the education system.”
Mr Elg said four out of the eight US Ivy League universities have adopted Workday Student, which provides a more intuitive interface to help students navigate their coursework and remove friction points that could lead to them abandoning their studies and therefore harming an institution’s reputation.
“Universities in 2024 are still using the same software to manage their students as what they were using when I was at university in 2003 …which means the students who are using the systems at a university today, they were implemented, they were built before they were even born.
“This is a generation of kids that are using their phones so much that the government… introduce(d) legislation to stop them from using their phones when they’re 16, but when they rock up to campus, they’ve got a set of tools that are basically ancient in technological terms, and so the emphasis for Workday in coming into this market with Workday Student is to really uplift that student experience.”
University of Melbourne chief information officer Byron Collins said the institution had adopted Workday’s HR tool but was yet to use the new student offering.
“At the moment, what we are in the midst of doing is implementing their HR and finance solution, and that’s due to go live next year. It’ll be replacing a legacy solution from another technology vendor. We’re not, at this point, planning to take what is a brand new student system, new to market, and wade straight into replacing our current student system,” Mr Collins said.
But he supported Workday’s move into the sector and hoped it would ignite competition among other vendors.
“We see this as a positive. As other players start to respond, that provides choice. The more players that invest, the more choice that’s provided, the sector as a whole is going to be much better off.”
