Protests force disclosure of costs totaling $16,000 per student over 7 year rollout replacing 80 legacy systems
The total cost of a Workday implementation project at Washington University in St. Louis is set to hit almost $266 million, it was revealed after the project was the subject of protests from students.
In late October, students demonstrated outside the Faculty Senate demanding the University’s leadership reveal more details about its finances, including its spending on Workday, amid concerns about job losses at the institution.
In an email to Student Life, the institution’s independent student newspaper, David Gray, executive vice chancellor for finance and chief financial officer (CFO), said the total cost of the project was set to reach upwards of $265 million over at least seven years, roughly $16,000 per student.
The student newspaper said the Workday project was broken down into $81 million for financial and human resources services (HCM), $98.9 million for the student application called Sunrise, and $56.5 million for planning, data integration, and financial aid. Meanwhile $23.8 million in the 2026 financial year is for support and $5.7 million for annual licensing.
The project started with HCM in 2018, which went live in 2021. The student application started planning in 2020 and went live in 2024 and 2025.
“The legacy student information system was in its last phase of life. It was a 1990s era set of fragile, homegrown applications including WebSTAC, WebFAC, SIS Admin and other platforms. With the transition, the University replaced nearly 80 separate student systems with Workday,” Gray told the newspaper.
We contacted both the University and Workday for comment and will update this article if we hear back.
Washington University in St. Louis is a private research university in Missouri. It is not to be confused with the University of Washington, a public university in Washington State.
Co-incidentally, the latter has also implemented Workday in a project which similarly attracted criticism. In March last year, hundreds of research grants were stuck in processing limbo, as the institution grappled with the $340 million implementation.
The US West Coast university spent more than five years shifting to a centralized cloud-based SaaS finance and HR system. At the time, it said it had made significant progress with its workstreams, but there was still more to do.
In late 2024, Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach told The Register that more than 90 percent of the SaaS HR and finance application vendor's rollouts were a success, putting aside the company's high-profile difficulties in Maine and Iowa state-level projects. ®