When Your SIS Vendor Files Chapter 11: What’s Next for Higher Education Institutions
On September 29, 2025, Anthology Inc. — one of the most recognized names in higher education technology — filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection as part of a restructuring plan aimed at reducing debt and refocusing on its core products. The filing includes twenty-six affiliated entities and reports between $1 billion and $10 billion in assets and liabilities.
While Anthology’s management has emphasized that operations will continue during the restructuring, institutions that depend on its systems now face a critical period of uncertainty. From student retention data to faculty workload management, even a temporary disruption can have a lasting impact on institutional effectiveness.
What This Means for Colleges and Universities
What this guarantees is a change to your operations and technology and a need to understand your options and future proof your institution against similar changes later.
While Chapter 11 is designed to help companies reorganize and emerge stronger financially but often cause large disruption for their clients as assets or divisions are sold off, platform support gets sunset and key resources leave the company. This introduces a host of operational risks for customers, especially those whose daily functions depend on Anthology platforms.
Anthology’s restructuring will likely reverberate across higher education for months and potentially years to come. While the company has emphasized continuity, the filing underscores a broader vulnerability in the edtech market: many institutions have become deeply dependent on a small set of vendors to power mission-critical operations. Here are key areas that will be impacted:
Operational Continuity at Risk
Even temporary vendor instability can create uncertainty around support, updates, and integrations. Institutions that rely on Anthology systems for student engagement, risk alerts, or faculty workload management may find themselves facing delays or resource gaps as teams within the company shift focus or scale back.
For campuses running tight academic calendars and compliance deadlines, even short-term disruptions can have significant ripple effects on performance metrics, accreditation reporting, and grant obligations.
Financial Planning and Budgeting Implications
Many colleges are already under financial pressure from enrollment volatility and shifting federal funding. A vendor’s restructuring can further complicate multi-year technology budgets, especially for institutions that have prepaid for licenses or are mid-cycle in system upgrades.
CFOs and CIOs will need to work closely to model different outcomes, from delayed renewals to accelerated migrations, and determine how each would impact the institution’s fiscal year planning.
Data Integrity and Student Outcomes
Anthology’s products underpin key student success and retention analytics. If those tools face reconfiguration, sale, or integration changes, institutional leaders risk losing visibility into critical data that guides interventions and support programs.
A loss of data continuity can erode the reliability of longitudinal reporting, impacting institutional effectiveness and student success metrics that feed directly into funding, rankings, and accreditation.
Strategic and Vendor Dependencies
The potential acquisition of Anthology’s SIS and ERP business by Ellucian signals a market consolidation that could reshape vendor relationships across higher education. While this may bring opportunities for streamlined integration, it also raises concerns about reduced competition and the pace of innovation.
Institutions should anticipate the possibility of new contract structures, revised service models, and shifting product roadmaps. This is the time to review vendor diversification strategies and ensure the institution’s technology direction is guided by internal strategy, not vendor circumstance.
Governance and Leadership Readiness
Beyond technology, this moment tests institutional governance. CIOs, provosts, and presidents will need to align on response plans that balance operational continuity with long-term transformation.
Institutions that treat this as a governance challenge, not just an IT issue, will be better positioned to make informed, proactive decisions. This moment presents challenges but also opportunity. For higher education leaders, the Anthology situation is not simply a vendor issue, it’s a stress test of institutional resilience.
Technology ecosystems in higher ed are deeply interconnected. A disruption in one core system often cascades into others. Waiting for clarity from vendors can leave institutions reacting rather than leading. The ability to review key strategies, service delivery models and business objectives in the current business and technology landscape can provide a strategic opportunity to gain an advantage over other institutions.
“This moment calls for strategic calm.” said Michelle Clifton, Managing Partner, Higher Education. “The institutions that emerge strongest from market disruptions aren’t the ones that change platforms fastest — they’re the ones that plan deliberately, protect their data, and align technology decisions with their mission.”
Proactive planning starts with a few essential steps:
- Conduct a Rapid Risk Assessment.
Identify which of your mission-critical processes relies directly or indirectly on Anthology systems. Understand where potential failure points exist if updates, integrations, or data transfers stall. - Review Your Data Maturity and Readiness.
Evaluate your institution’s foundational data model. How clean, accessible, and portable is your information if you need to migrate or integrate with a different system? - Reassess Your Service Delivery Model.
Institutions that operate with internal support only may struggle to respond quickly during a vendor transition. Consider whether your operational model allows for external support, managed services, or vendor-neutral advisory guidance if needed
Choosing the Right Partner
This is not a moment for rushed platform decisions or reactive vendor swaps. Institutions should look for partners who bring three critical attributes:
- Vendor Neutrality: Guidance free from product or platform bias, ensuring decisions are based on your institution’s needs, not a software vendor’s roadmap.
- Higher Ed Specialization: Deep understanding of academic, financial, and student processes unique to higher education environments.
- Operational Continuity Expertise: Proven experience stabilizing systems during transitions, maintaining service levels, and developing phased migration strategies.
- AI leadership and Guidance: With the opportunity to review all your processes and where to leverage AI to get more from your people and budgets as well as how to reskill workers to be more effective in an AI enabled environment.
Selecting a partner who can provide stability, and objectivity will be the most important decision institutional leaders make in the coming months.
Next Steps
Join our three-part webinar series, Beyond Anthology — Stabilizing Your Systems, Safeguarding Student Success, designed to educate, diagnose, and prescribe a clear path forward, directly addressing the core anxiety points (financials, enrollment, data risk, service delivery). RSVP for the webinars below.
Webinar 1: Understand the impact. This webinar focuses on the external factors—the Chapter 11 filing and the Ellucian acquisition—and their potential impact on your institution's finances and student enrollment. It will help you identify immediate operational risks and introduces a three-step framework for executive response: stabilize, assess, and strategize.
Reserve Your Spot For Webinar 1 Here
2. Risk to Resilience: Building a Stable Foundation Amid Platform Change
Webinar 2: Understand your data. This webinar focuses on how to protect your institution’s core data and ensure continuity—no matter what happens with your LMS, SIS, or CRM systems.
Reserve Your Spot For Webinar 2 Here
3. Delivering Excellence: Future-Proofing Service During System Transitions
Webinar 3: Understand Service Delivery. This webinar focuses on how platform changes create hidden risks, building a resilient Service Delivery Model, and how to preserve service levels. Join us to learn actionable tools to future-proof operations and strengthen institutional resilience.
Reserve Your Spot For Webinar 3 Here
By taking these proactive steps, institutions can strengthen resilience, safeguard student outcomes, and maintain strategic control over their operations, even in the face of market instability. Technology market disruptions are a test of institutional readiness, but they also present an opportunity to reinforce processes, modernize systems, and ensure that leadership is prepared to act with clarity and confidence.
