Hello from Walsh College!

Hi everyone, I'm Andrew Crum (AG), Fractional CIO at Walsh College in Troy, Michigan. My firm, Polaris1, ran Walsh's Student First implementation. Walsh is a private business school. We offer undergraduate degree-completion programs, the MBA, a set of MS programs and doctoral programs. We have about 1,200 students a term, plus another 500–700 in an online partner program that runs as a second institution in the same tenant.

• Calendar: We run four terms a year (Fall, Winter, Spring and Summer), with in-person, online and hybrid classes.
• Go-live: We've been live since July 2026, after moving off Ellucian Colleague. Admissions, academics, financial aid and student accounts all moved at the same time.
• Full history, not just active students: We moved nearly 50 years of records, going back to 1977. That includes 30,000+ students, 578,000 course records, 500,000 section registrations, 375,000 ledger transactions, 154,000 transfer courses, 42,000 degrees and 31,000 financial aid years, all loaded through the API.
• What we built around it: We built our own apps on top of Student First instead of adding more third-party systems. They include a student and staff portal, an online admissions application, a degree audit engine, and a set of integration pipelines and webhooks.
• Moodle: We built our own sync off Student First's LMS webhook to replace the old LMS connector. It runs every 30 minutes and keeps Moodle courses, users and enrollments current, and it brings grades and attendance back into Student First.
• Integrations: Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT (GL), Paymentus, ACI payment plans, Etrieve, Akademos/VitalSource and Okta SSO.

What we automate:

• Admissions: Inquiry forms create Student First leads automatically. An admit creates the person and enrollment, sets holds and conditions, and generates and emails the decision letter. Accepting the offer provisions the student's Okta account and school email.
• Student status: A daily job reads Moodle activity and updates each student's status in Student First. Students who show up in class move to Active, students who drift away for four terms move to Withdrawn, and admitted students whose start term ended without a registration are marked Nonstart. Student First's own valid-transition rules gate every change, and the job never overrides a status a person set by hand.
• Student accounts: Holds for prior-term balances are placed, escalated and cleared automatically from the term calendar. This replaced a manual list plus manual Moodle suspensions. Payment-due reminders and late fees run off each term's census date, and the payment-plan feed with ACI runs automatically.
• Registrar and academics: Graduation applications from both of our forms come together in one list, with the fee posted automatically. Faculty get final-grade reminders. A student-status review compares Student First against Moodle activity and writes the decisions back.
• Financial aid: A daily snapshot feeds an FA dashboard and a worklist of the specific blocker on each student's file.
• Everything else: A daily bookstore feed goes to Akademos, applicant data goes to our recruitment partner, there's a daily data-quality checklist, and F-1 compliance tracking.

I'm happy to share what worked and what didn't, especially on data migration, multi-institution setups, degree audits, LMS sync and GL mapping. I'm looking forward to swapping ideas with other Student First schools.

AG