Workday Student, the platform set to replace WebSTAC, went live and became accessible to WashU students on Feb. 17. Workday will serve as the University’s new central hub for academic information, course registration, advising, and eventually student financials.

According to The Student Sunrise Project team, which is overseeing the transition to Workday, students will use Workday and WebSTAC for different purposes this semester and summer. Workday will be used to view and update academic, personal, and contact information, as well as to plan and register for Fall 2025 courses. 

Meanwhile, WebSTAC will remain in use for making changes to spring 2025 schedules, planning and registering for summer 2025 courses, managing financial transactions for summer 2025 and earlier academic periods, and accessing transcripts.

By fall 2025, WashU students will exclusively use Workday Student, replacing WebSTAC for all tasks.

According to Erin Culbreth — Executive Director of the Student Sunrise Project — though the bulk of the system was made available to students on Feb. 17, the multistep process to implement Workday has been in the works since around 2016.

“The move to Workday is part of a larger institutional shift,” Culbreth said. “We implemented the part of Workday for HR and finance a few years ago, and that was the first phase of this broader initiative. The student part of the system was always [the final stage], so we’ve been actively working on this element for the past four years.”

Culbreth explained that the transition was necessary because of WebSTAC’s outdated and disorganized system. She believes that Workday is much better suited for WashU’s modern administrative needs.

“There’s over 80 different systems hooked together that make up the current infrastructure, and they’re really old. We’ve been using these systems since the 1990s,” Culbreth said. “They were built for a University of the past [and] really aren’t supporting the University that we’re becoming, especially in areas across interdisciplinary work.”

The new Workday site features a number of changes from the WebSTAC system, which may take students some time to get used to. Some terminology will be changed in the transition — for example, “degree audit” in WebSTAC will be called “academic progress” in Workday.

Some of the most notable changes come from how course registration will function. In Workday, students from each grade will all register for classes at the same time, without assigned slots. 

Matthew DeVoll, Senior Assistant Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences and member of the Advising, Degree Audit, & Curriculum team, said that if students cannot register for all of their desired classes during registration, they will be able to put themselves on as many waitlists as they wish. Workday does not count waitlisted classes towards a student’s 21-credit limit. However, each waitlist will have a cap, limiting the number of students who can join it.

Keri Disch, University Registrar, explained to Student Life that Workday also prevents students from registering for classes that take place at the same time. The change ensures class seats remain available for students committed to attending the course, rather than being held by those who will later drop in favor of another course. 

Janie Brennan, the Mckelvey Instructor for Faculty and Academic Advising for the project’s instructor-led trainings, said that students enrolled in classes with overlapping time slots could jeopardize the University’s accreditation. 

“There are students who deliberately try to take courses that are at the same time thinking that [they] can just watch the recordings for one class and it won’t be an issue,” Brennan said. “We could lose our accreditation if we let students take a bunch of classes at the same time.” 

Workday also automatically verifies that students have taken the required prerequisites before registering for a course. Jennifer Smith, Vice Provost for Educational Initiatives and Process Owner for Advising on the project, said that professors have faced challenges due to WebSTAC’s inability to enforce this requirement. 

“You want to let students in if they want to take your class, but then you [have to] review things. You’re not able to teach the class at the level you intended to, because you ended up with all these students who didn’t [take the] pre-req,” Smith said. “I think it will be a positive thing that everybody in the class has the preparation they need.”

Sophomore Chuan Shuo Chen feels that the required prerequisites cause an additional obstacle when picking classes during course registration.

“[Enforced prerequisites] add another layer of complexity to registration. Given that a lot of these classes have pretty limited availability already, that would [cause] a delay,” Chen said.

Additionally, classes in Workday will be listed by academic subject rather than the department in which they are housed.Classes will also no longer be cross-listed across several departments. DeVoll recognizes that this could cause issues for students trying to find classes in interdisciplinary majors. 

“Programs that are interdisciplinary draw a lot of courses from other departments. If a student opens up that department to look for courses and sees one or two classes there, are they going to say, ‘I guess they’re not offering anything,’ when the program is actually robust?” DeVoll said. “The college and departments will be thinking about how we make sure students are aware of the courses that satisfy [interdisciplinary] programs.”

The Student Sunrise team is trying to make students aware of these changes in Workday. In a written statement to Student Life, Disch emphasized the effort the project has put into engaging and sharing information with WashU community members.

“According to Workday, no other university has put this much effort into preparing its community. We had over 1,000 students come to our preview and practice events. No other university has done something at that scale,” Disch wrote.

Even so, Chen found that Workday presented some challenges compared to WebSTAC.

“A lot of the stuff in WebSTAC was pretty well laid out. Each page has a defined functionality to it, whereas Workday is more convoluted. They tried to put a lot of different functions together and you have to jump through a lot of hoops to get to the actual registration,” Chen said.

WashU faculty and advisors will be the ones responsible for helping students jump through said hoops. To help them prepare, Project Director of the Student Sunrise Project Ellen Rostand said that the project has hosted a variety of exposure sessions, to help WashU staff orient themselves to Workday’s functions.

“We’ve had a year of practice. [Faculty and academic advisors] had an opportunity to come to the Mock Enroll event in the fall. Then in January, we picked up our training program for faculty and academic advisors,” Rostand said. “They have a couple of options: one is an instructor-led training that we do over zoom. There is also an e-learning that they can take on their own time.”

DeVoll noted that some advisors have said they are able to navigate Workday easily, while others have been less comfortable with the change. 

Even as Workday has been published for students and faculty to begin using, DeVoll said that the system is not yet completely finished.

“It is not a single moment to switch off of an old system, and switch on a new system. We’re still doing some things in the old system, like managing schedules for spring and summer 2025, and doing some things in the new system, like registering for fall 2025. That entire process requires a lot of agility and a lot of patience to recognize that [if a] piece looks wrong, it may not be wrong. It might just not be finished,” DeVoll said.

Disch wrote to Student Life that Workday will never be fully finished, as the program will constantly be evolving and changing.

“Every six months, Workday pushes out new features and functionality for its customers to evaluate and uptake. Some aspects of the system people don’t like could very well be addressed in future feature releases,” Disch wrote.

In the meantime, DeVoll explained that WashU faculty has been collaborating to learn about the new system.

“This shared puzzle to solve has brought people together in a way that hadn’t necessarily happened before,” DeVoll said. “I’m hoping that it has positive cultural changes, in that people can see that they are rowing in the same boat and trying to pull forward together.”

WORKDAY HELP RESOURCES: Students can find assistance for Workday here. There are also virtual and in-person office hours, a helpline at 314-935-WDAY (9329), and a help ticket system at servicedesk.washu.edu.