Community Colleges
Serve more students without adding a reporting team
Deans, advisors, and program directors answer their own questions on definitions your team controls, including the part-time, dual-enrolled, and non-credit students the federal formula leaves out. One reporting tool serves the whole college.
Trusted by community and technical colleges across the United States and Australia
The situation
You grew. The reporting office did not.
The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center's enrollment estimates put community college growth at roughly 173,000 students in fall 2025 and 9.6 percent over two years, more than double the rate at public four-year institutions. Almost none of that growth came with a reporting hire.
The EDUCAUSE Top 10 IT Issues list names the consequence at number ten, finding that "smaller institutions in particular report limited data and analytics support for staff, including access to training, policies and guidelines, and communities of practice."
01
Every question routes to the same person
A dean, an advisor, and a workforce program director all need something this week. All three land with the person who is also building the state submission.
02
The graduation rate IPEDS publishes is not the one your college runs on
The federal cohort is first-time, full-time, for-credit. Your success rate has to count part-time, returning, and non-credit students too, on definitions your college sets, and today that number is rebuilt by hand every time somebody asks.
03
Dual enrollment is driving the growth, and it reports like nothing else
High school partners, parent and counselor approvals, minors' records, and a term that starts on the high school calendar. Every fall the population grows, and every fall somebody assembles the partner reports by hand.
04
Every enrollment generates paperwork in both directions
The student owes you a transcript, a residency proof, an immunization record, and placement scores. You owe the student a notice for each one still missing, and later an award letter, a transcript or certificate, or a verification letter the student requests for an outside party. All of it produced one at a time in the weeks the office has the least room.
Governed self-service
One reporting tool can serve the whole college
Argos separates who writes the query from who runs the report. Your team owns the logic, the definitions, and the permissions. Every other office selects parameters, filters, schedules, and exports without seeing a schema or holding a database credential.
Who can run what is decided in one place, by folder and by report, and the same permissions cover the report, the dashboard, and the plain-language answer. Adding an audience means granting access, with nothing new to secure. No ERP accounts to provision for any of it.
- Views built for advisors, division deans, and program directors, each permissioned to the people in that role
- Unlimited users under the institutional license, with no ERP seat or login required
- Scheduled delivery so the list arrives instead of being requested
- Dashboard Designer builds and shares dashboards from the browser, embedded in your portal and readable on a phone
- Community-shared objects through the CO-OP community, so you start from something instead of nothing
“No one has to remember to run a report, because Argos handles it and gets the results directly to those who need to see.”
Jim Armstrong · Technical Projects Coordinator · Cuyahoga Community College
SELECT program, completersFROM DataBlock: CompletionWHERE year = :yearArgos X
The one-person reporting office gets help that does not require a hire
The person who knows your ERP, your state submission spec, and the number the president wants before the board meeting is the same person. Their week is already spent, and their vacation is an institutional risk.
Argos Data Agent lets a dean or a program director ask in plain language against data your team governs, and shows the SQL, so the answer can be checked before it travels. The EDUCAUSE Top 10 IT Issues panel makes this point directly for institutions like yours, noting that emerging AI capabilities "can help provide quicker access to data and insights, which can be especially valuable for institutions lacking internal resources and support."
A one-person office also ends up building what a larger institution would purchase. Equipment and iPad lending, fitness center and event check-in, and ID card lookups, all on the license the college already pays for. Applications that write back to the ERP are on-premises only, so bring the specific process and we will tell you what is possible in your environment.
- Argos Data Agent for plain-language questions, with the SQL visible
- Pivot Mode and Explore Data for reshaping and exporting without a new request
- Answers grounded in governed objects and existing permissions, not an uploaded spreadsheet
- Zero Data Retention, with masking and redaction available on sensitive fields
- Dashboard Designer, Explore Data, and Pivot Mode are included with Argos at no additional cost
- Argos Data Agent is licensed separately, in Core and Advanced tiers
“We're just pulling stuff that's already been pre-calculated by Colleague. It ensures that the Registrar, Financial Aid, and Advising Offices are all seeing the same kind of information.”
Michelle Shadrake · IT Director, Enterprise Applications · Alvin College
Measurement
Count the students and programs the federal formula leaves out
Most of your enrollment does not appear in a federal graduation rate. Part-time students, students who stopped out and returned, dual enrollment students, and everyone earning a non-credit credential are all outside the metric, and non-credit data frequently lives in a different system entirely.
Argos reports on the credit record and on the non-credit system through their own connections, so a dean can see both on one dashboard without anyone moving data between them. Definitions are stored as objects, so the completion and placement measures you build, including the ones Workforce Pell asks for, run the same way when eligibility is reviewed.
- Non-credit, workforce, and continuing education reporting beside the credit record, each from its own system
- Completion, placement, and cohort definitions saved once and reproduced in a future year
- Part-time, stop-out, and concurrent high school enrollment handled as first-class populations
- Fixed-width and delimited extracts for state, IPEDS, and performance funding submissions
- Grant reporting for Perkins, Title III, Title V, and workforce awards from the same governed layer
FormFusion and Argos
The documents each office has to send back out
Open access means volume, and the documents come from every direction. The registrar produces the enrollment and degree verifications a student requested for an insurer or an employer. Admissions chases whatever is still outstanding: the transcript, the residency proof, the immunization record, the placement score. Financial aid sends the award letter and every revision after it. Different offices, same four steps, several thousand times a year.
Two tools cover it, split by whether your ERP already runs a job for the document. FormFusion takes the output of a job the ERP already runs, adds the fields the baseline template cannot carry, applies your branding, and delivers it: password-protected encrypted email, your student portal, your imaging system, DocuSign, or paper when a partner requires it. Where there is no ERP job, Argos produces the document from the record and schedules it.
- FormFusion, from ERP jobs: award letters and revision notices, bills, the enrollment and degree verifications your office processes, and the missing-items checklist letter the ERP already generates
- Argos, from the record: dual enrollment agreements and the partner, parent, and counselor paperwork around them, letters to partner high schools, and any notice nobody built a job for
- Documents fed straight into imaging or a network folder, removing the print, scan, and index cycle
- FormFusion does not require Argos; each reads your ERP directly and neither depends on the other
Reporting that does not depend on one person
When the college can answer its own questions, the person building the state submission stops being the bottleneck for the rest of the college. See it in a demo.
In their words
Community colleges, without a reporting team
Two-year, technical, and open-access colleges running Argos or FormFusion in production, mostly with very small IT teams.
“
Argos made it super easy.
Imperial Valley College
Institutional Reporting
Reporting across campus systems without adding technical staff to build or maintain it.
Outcome
Reporting built and governed in-house on Colleague, with staff outside the technical team running their own reports.
Carl Albert State College
Institutional Effectiveness
“
Reports like 'Financial Aid Year in Review' and 'Financial Aid History' are accessed frequently and put financial aid data at our fingertips.
Stephanie Bogard Trapp, Director of Financial Aid
Lansing Community College
Enrollment Services
Governed self-service reporting across enrollment functions, with report access decoupled from ERP accounts.
Outcome
Automated daily communications replaced mailed notices, improving timeliness and student response while cutting postage and paper.
Related
The same data serves four offices
Institutional Research
Performance funding, IPEDS, and cohort definitions that reproduce.
Financial Aid
Packaging exceptions, award letters, and refunds that reach students on time.
Registrar and Enrollment Services
Census, verifications, and the transcript volume open access generates.
IT
The one-person reporting office, the ERP environment, and the security review.
How it fits
Where this sits relative to what you already run
With your ERP
Your ERP stays the system of record. Argos queries it directly through governed objects and FormFusion produces the documents it generates. Neither replaces it, and neither asks you to build a warehouse to report on non-credit alongside credit.
With Ellucian Insights
Insights aggregates data across Ellucian products on a managed data layer. Argos works directly against your own environment, covering dashboards through Dashboard Designer, conversational analysis through Argos Data Agent, compliance output, and scheduled delivery, on definitions your team controls. Most institutions run both.
Versus your current process
Today the answer depends on one person being available, non-credit lives in its own system, and every verification is assembled by hand. It is what happens when enrollment grows 9.6 percent and the staffing chart does not.
Trust and security
You take security seriously. So do we.
The Trust Center is published and the HECVAT is available on request, so a reviewer can start before anyone schedules a call.
Permissions are enforced, never overridden
A report can only be opened by someone your team has permissioned to run it, and a view is built for the role that needs it, which is what makes advisor and dean self-service compatible with FERPA.
Authentication
LDAP group sync and SAML SSO configured once at the MAPS layer, with permission tiers set per product in the same place, by the same team.
Minors and dual enrollment
Views built for high school partners carry only what the dual enrollment agreement covers, and are permissioned to the partner alone.
Production performance
Query queuing and priority keep reporting load from competing with registration during peak.
Data handling
FERPA-aligned practices, encryption in transit, and AES-encrypted password-protected document delivery. For Argos Data Agent, masking or redaction of sensitive fields.
Documentation
Trust Center, and a HECVAT (the standard higher education security questionnaire) on request.
Frequently asked questions
Questions we get asked first
We have one person doing reporting. How much of a lift is this?
That is the situation the product is built for. Your team defines objects once and the rest of the college runs them, so a small team can serve a growing college.
Can we report on non-credit and workforce programs alongside credit enrollment?
Yes, side by side. Argos connects to the continuing education or workforce system through its own connection, so its reports and the credit reports sit on the same platform and the same dashboard. The data is not merged into one record; that would be a warehouse project.
Can we measure completion and placement for short-term credentials?
Yes, and the definitions are stored as governed objects so they run the same way when eligibility is reviewed later. What your systems never captured cannot be recovered by any tool, so start the measurement before you need it.
Can we handle dual enrollment cohorts and students under 18?
Yes. Cohorts are defined as objects, and a view built for a partner carries only the fields the agreement covers and is permissioned to that partner.
Does this help with state performance funding submissions?
Argos produces the formatted output those submissions require and delivers it on a schedule. The submission itself remains yours.
Do advisors and deans need a Banner or Colleague login?
No. Licensing is per institution with unlimited users, and report access does not require an ERP seat.
What is included with Argos, and what is licensed separately?
Dashboard Designer, Explore Data, and Pivot Mode are included with Argos at no additional cost. Argos Data Agent is licensed separately, in Core and Advanced tiers.
What happens to student data when someone uses Data Agent?
Argos Data Agent operates under Zero Data Retention, honors existing permissions, and supports masking and redaction. It runs against governed objects instead of the raw database.
Do we need Argos to use FormFusion?
No. They are separate products doing separate jobs, and each reads your ERP directly. Colleges that run both use each for what it is built for: Argos to answer questions against your data, FormFusion to turn ERP output into the finished document.
Is there anything we can start from instead of building it all?
Yes. The CO-OP community shares reporting objects across institutions, and Starter Packs ship pre-built objects across Student, Finance, Financial Aid, HR, and Advancement.
How does this coexist with Ellucian Insights?
Insights aggregates across Ellucian products on a managed data layer. Argos runs against your own environment on your team's definitions. Most institutions run both.
How long does implementation take?
It depends on how much you want live on day one. Professional Services scopes it with you. The people doing that scoping ran campus IT and institutional reporting before they worked here.
What does it cost, and can we talk to one like us?
Licensing is per institution rather than per user, and price is driven by institution size and product mix rather than headcount. Argos, Argos X, FormFusion, and IntelleCheck all carry unlimited users and unlimited connections, with no per-connection or per-report charge and nothing billed for people who only read reports. The one exception is Argos Data Agent Advanced, which is licensed per seat. Data Agent Core is unlimited. Tell us your FTE and which products you are weighing and we will give you a real figure on the first call, then put you in touch with an institution of roughly your size and ERP. Ask them about support while you are there. It is in-house, and it is the thing customers raise unprompted more than anything else.
Next step
A college that answers for itself
Get a demo and see every office run and modify its own reports inside the limits IT set.
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