Higher Education services: Powering a force for the future

Deloitte’s Higher Education practice helped three California State University (CSU) campuses launch a shared administrative model that reduced costs, streamlined operations, and preserved each institution’s unique mission. Through the San Francisco Bay Region Network, Sonoma State, San Francisco State, and Cal State East Bay unified key back-office services in just six months—creating millions in recurring savings and a scalable model for long-term resilience, collaboration, and student success.

To modernize operations and provide a more cohesive experience across 21 institutions, the University of Arkansas System collaborated with Deloitte on Project One, consolidating more than 30 legacy platforms into a unified Workday environment. The transformation streamlined finance, HR, and student processes, strengthened reporting and planning, and enabled a more connected, data-driven experience for leaders, employees, and students across the entire system.

Deloitte worked with a large public university in California to deploy STELLA Navigator, an AI-powered tutoring platform built for scalable, personalized learning. As enrollment grew, the institution needed individualized support at scale. Our solution delivers real-time, adaptive feedback to students while giving faculty actionable analytics for timely interventions—improving student outcomes, boosting faculty efficiency, and creating a replicable model for AI-enabled education.

Deloitte helped a leading R1 research university define a future-state research computing strategy to support advanced AI and data-intensive research across disciplines. Through stakeholder engagement, peer benchmarking, and financial modeling, the team developed a roadmap for scalable infrastructure, governance, and funding. The effort positioned the university to launch a more equitable, sustainable computing environment and strengthen its ability to attract top talent.

A large, public R1 research university engaged Deloitte to build the foundation for a sustainable enterprise risk management (ERM) program. Working with leadership and stakeholders, we defined the ERM vision, assessed current-state maturity, designed governance structures, and created core tools including a risk taxonomy, risk register, assessment methodology, and training materials. The result was a more coordinated, repeatable approach to identifying and managing risk across the institution.

When leaders at Washington State University needed a solution for complex grant forecasting, they selected Deloitte to design an industry-first tool using Workday Adaptive Planning. The approach combined institutional and technical expertise to create a system that forecasts facilities and administrative costs, projects personnel expenses, and enables scenario planning. The solution now supports 900+ researchers, standardizes reporting, and serves as a national model for research administration.

A large, private R1 university selected Deloitte to build a world-class IT organization—aligning its operating model, roles, and skills to a five-year digital transformation strategy. We successfully designed the future-state org, competency framework, job architecture, and market-based compensation, then supported a competitive talent transition—resulting in a higher-skilled, more unified (and more diverse) workforce positioned to boost service and accelerate innovation.

Deloitte helped the University of North Carolina (UNC) System turn a complex legislative mandate into a practical, scalable way to assess academic program value across 16 universities. By combining institutional, labor market, and wage data into interactive dashboards, the team delivered a consistent ROI framework that revealed the long-term value of a UNC education and equipped leaders with actionable insights on costs, outcomes, workforce alignment, and public impact.

Deloitte helped Northwestern University modernize advancement analytics by strengthening its reporting strategy and building a scalable data foundation around Salesforce. The team designed self-service models, streamlined data integration, and expanded warehouse capabilities to improve access to high-quality donor and gift data. The result: faster, easier reporting and greater agility for Alumni Relations and Development leadership and analytics teams.