CHOOSING AN ERP IN 2026: WHAT BANNER, WORKDAY, AND PEOPLESOFT ACTUALLY COST YOU

ERP Selection · Higher Education · Digital Transformation

Every few years, a college or university convinces itself that the next ERP decision will finally be the clean one: a tidy RFP, a short list of three vendors, a scorecard, a signature. It never quite works that way. Ellucian Banner, Workday, and Oracle PeopleSoft Campus Solutions are all mature, capable platforms, and every one of them has satisfied customers and bruised ones. The institutions that come out of the process happy are usually the ones that stopped treating the choice as a feature comparison and started treating it as a ten-year bet on an operating model.

Three Platforms, Three Different Bets

Banner remains the platform built specifically for higher education, and it still holds the largest installed base among American colleges and universities, particularly in the community college and regional university sector where its student information system depth is hard to replicate. Workday has become the default answer for institutions that want a single, modern, cloud-native system spanning finance and human capital management, and it has picked up real momentum among research universities that are modernizing off Banner or PeopleSoft rather than starting from scratch. PeopleSoft Campus Solutions, meanwhile, is most often found at large research institutions that were early Oracle adopters and have enough internal technical capacity to keep customizing it indefinitely. None of these is a wrong answer. Each one assumes a different level of institutional appetite for change, and that appetite matters more than any individual feature.

What the Sticker Price Doesn’t Tell You

The number that shows up in a vendor’s initial proposal is rarely the number an institution ends up paying. Community colleges and mid-size universities typically land somewhere between two hundred thousand and seven hundred fifty thousand dollars a year in licensing, and then spend another half million to two million dollars on implementation services on top of that. Large research universities replacing a full enterprise suite are looking at software and implementation costs that can run five to twenty million dollars or more once a multi-year program is fully staffed. What tends to blindside budget committees isn’t the license fee, it’s everything wrapped around it: data migration from a system that has been customized for two decades, integration with financial aid, advancement, and research administration tools that never appear on a vendor’s roadmap slide, and the staff time required to retrain an entire registrar’s office. A comprehensive ERP transformation can stretch to seven years from kickoff to steady state, and the institutions that budget for a two-year project are the ones that end up back in front of the board asking for more money in year three.

The RFP Questions That Actually Matter

A good RFP for a higher education ERP looks less like a generic enterprise software checklist and more like an interrogation of fit. It asks how the vendor’s roadmap treats financial aid packaging and satisfactory academic progress rules, since those are the workflows that break institutions when they’re handled generically. It asks how many peer institutions of a similar size and Carnegie classification are live on the proposed configuration, not just under contract, because there is a meaningful gap between a signed deal and a working registrar’s office. It asks pointed questions about integration philosophy: does the vendor expect the institution to live entirely inside one suite, or is it built to sit alongside a CRM, an LMS, and a handful of specialized tools that already work well. And it asks, bluntly, what a real implementation timeline looks like for an institution of comparable complexity, with named references willing to talk about what went wrong, not just what went right. Institutions that skip that last conversation are usually the ones surprised by the seven-year timeline later.

Timing the Decision

Part of what makes 2026 a strange year to be making this call is that the pressure to act has become a board-level topic rather than an IT housekeeping matter, driven by a mix of aging on-premise systems, tightening budgets tied to enrollment pressure, and rising expectations that data should support real-time decision making rather than end-of-semester reporting. Yet actual cloud ERP adoption is still moving slowly relative to the pressure, because the operational complexity of migrating two decades of customizations is real and does not shrink just because the case for urgency has grown. Institutions generally end up choosing one of three paths: move now to a new platform, hold and wait for a preferred vendor’s roadmap to mature, or modernize the incumbent system in place while deferring the bigger decision. There is no universally correct answer among the three, but there is a wrong way to arrive at one, and that is letting the decision get made by default because nobody wanted to own it.

What We’re Seeing on the Ground

In our work with colleges and universities evaluating these platforms, the institutions that navigate the decision well tend to do one thing differently from the ones that struggle: they involve the people who will actually use the system, not just the people who will sign for it. Registrars, financial aid directors, and department chairs catch workflow problems that a steering committee of vice presidents will never see coming. The technology decision is real, but it is downstream of a governance decision about who gets a voice in it.

Beidat LLC works with colleges and universities on exactly this kind of decision, from ERP selection and RFP strategy through implementation oversight and change management. If your institution is weighing a Banner, Workday, or PeopleSoft decision and wants a second set of eyes before the RFP goes out, reach out at support@beidat.com or 888.384.1992.

References

EDUCAUSE Review. (2025, October). 2026 EDUCAUSE top 10: Making connections. https://er.educause.edu/articles/2025/10/2026-educause-top-10-making-connections

ERP Today. (2026). Higher education’s cloud ERP shift is stuck on the student system. https://erp.today/higher-education-erp-cloud-student-system-workday-oracle

GovTech. (2026). Emerging tech demands drive ERP modernization in higher ed. https://www.govtech.com/education/higher-ed/emerging-tech-demands-drive-erp-modernization-in-higher-ed

Last updated on August 29, 2026