Your SIS Just Changed Hands. Now What?

“Empowering learners for a lifetime of education”

That’s how Laura Ipsen, president and CEO of Ellucian, described the acquisition in January 2026. It’s a fine statement. It is also, notably, not “supporting schools with clock-hour compliance.” Not “helping Title IV proprietary institutions manage 90/10.” Not “serving the operators who train the next generation of welders and medical assistants.”

That language gap is not an accident. Ellucian is a traditional higher education company. Its clients are universities, community colleges, and four-year institutions. It acquired the Anthology SIS/ERP business — which includes CampusNexus, the platform that career school operators have relied on for years — for approximately $70 million, out of a bankruptcy process where Anthology carried more than $1 billion in debt.
Ellucian got a platform. Whether that platform stays purpose-built for the career school market is a strategic decision Ellucian hasn’t made yet, or hasn’t announced.

Career school operators should be asking whether to wait for that answer — or get ahead of it.

What the market was already telling you

The Anthology collapse didn’t come out of nowhere, and the migration activity that preceded it wasn’t a coincidence. Career schools had been quietly switching SIS platforms throughout 2023 and 2024, driven by a set of breakpoints that had been accumulating for years.

The operating environment had fundamentally changed. By fall 2024, 81.9% of for-profit students were primarily enrolled via distance education. Schools built for physical campuses were running on systems designed for that world — on-premise architecture, IT-managed upgrade cycles — against a student population that existed almost
entirely online.

Compliance demands had also outpaced the platforms. Clock-hour reporting, R2T4 calculations, and the post-2023 90/10 recalibrations exposed gaps in systems that hadn’t been meaningfully updated. Schools were managing federal requirements through manual workarounds because the SIS couldn’t automate what regulators
were asking for.

And then Anthology’s financial situation made everything else secondary. A vendor carrying $1B+ in debt, watching revenue decline by roughly $80 million between 2023 and 2025, was not investing heavily in the career school feature roadmap. Schools that had been waiting for the platform to catch up realized the platform wasn’t going to.

What the evaluation looks like in 2026

The criteria that drive SIS decisions have shifted. A decade ago, a career school evaluating platforms was asking about features and price. Today the evaluation is more consequential:

Vendor alignment with your market.
Does this company understand Title IV career education? Can their support team answer a question about SAP appeals or clock-hour reporting without escalating to a specialist? The acquisition made this question more urgent for CampusNexus customers — Ellucian’s institutional knowledge is in traditional higher education, not proprietary career schools.

Compliance automation, not compliance capability.
Every SIS claims compliance support. What separates platforms in 2026 is whether compliance workflows run automatically or require manual intervention. Schools that learned from the 90/10 recalculation cycle know the difference between a system that generates the report and a system that generates the data you then use to build the report.

Cloud hosting and real SLAs.
On-premise architecture is a strategic liability. Cloud-hosted systems with documented uptime guarantees and transparent incident history have a structural advantage — and implementation timelines have improved enough that a move doesn’t require nine months of operational disruption. Smaller operators can now go live in 90 to 180 days; larger or multi-campus schools typically run longer, but the gap from legacy timelines has closed
significantly.

API architecture.
Schools that locked into monolithic all-in-one platforms are finding themselves captive when they want to swap out one component — a CRM, an LMS, a document management system. The platforms winning in 2026 connect cleanly to best-of-breed tools through documented APIs.

What school evaluating SIS right now are prioritizing

Whether the trigger is the Anthology situation, a support contract renewal, or years of accumulated frustration, the schools actively evaluating SIS platforms in 2026 are asking a consistent set of questions. The criteria have converged:

Open API architecture.
Operators want a system that connects cleanly to the other tools they use — enrollment CRMs, LMS platforms, document management, financial aid servicers — through documented, maintained APIs. Vendor lock-in through proprietary integrations is now a recognized risk, not a selling point.

Cloud-based with real uptime accountability.
Schools want off-premise hosting with SLAs they can hold the vendor to. The question isn’t whether the system is “in the cloud” — it’s whether the vendor publishes incident history and guarantees availability during enrollment cycles.

Compliance built in, not bolted on.
Title IV career schools need automated workflows for 90/10, SAP, R2T4, and clock-hour reporting. The benchmark has shifted from “does the system support compliance” to “does it generate the report, or generate the data someone else turns into a report.”

Responsive implementation and ongoing support.
Schools have learned from bad experiences: vendor attention peaks at the sale and drops after go-live. The vendors winning evaluations in 2026 are the ones with verifiable support track records and implementation teams that understand career school operations — not generic higher ed deployments.

The Anthology situation accelerated the timeline for a lot of operators who had been watching and waiting. But the evaluation criteria above apply regardless of what triggered the review. The question is the same whether a school is on CampusNexus, an aging legacy system, or a platform that simply hasn’t kept pace: is what you have still the right tool for where your school is going?

STAT BLOCK

SOURCES