How Wesleyan transformed degree planning with quick and seamless implementation

Liberal arts colleges like Wesleyan pride themselves on letting students discover who they are before committing to a major. At Wesleyan, students don’t officially declare a major until their fourth semester, and half of them eventually double-major, giving them lots of space to experiment with minors and certificates along the way.

When Joshua Berry became the Registrar, he inherited a homegrown degree audit tool. The tool required faculty to tick off courses on a static form, was prone to crashing when requirements changed, and made graduate clearance logistically challenging. At the same time, Wesleyan was beginning a multi‑year transition to a new cloud‑based student information system (SIS), which promised an integrated future but couldn’t accommodate Wesleyan’s complexity. Specifically, they found that new SIS degree audit functionality:

• Did not support their double majors
• Lacked interactive planning for students
• Couldn’t replace the custom registration algorithm that balanced student preferences and faculty constraints.

“It became very apparent that our new SIS would not be able to handle the double majors that over half of our students pursue. We knew Stellic could do that."

Wesleyan needed more than a short-term fix, and they couldn’t wait years for a new SIS to catch up. They were looking for a platform for degree audit and planning that could:

• Match their academic flexibility
• Deliver quick results
• Avoid adding pressure to IT during their SIS migration

Josh had worked with Stellic before and knew it met all three needs. The degree audit could track multiple majors and minors without breaking when requirements changed. The planning tools would let students explore options before declaring, while keeping faculty advisors on the same page with real data. And the quick implementation meant Wesleyan could launch in months instead of years, turning an urgent problem into a chance to modernize advising and degree tracking ahead of schedule.

Wesleyan’s rollout began in July. Josh and Amanda, Senior Associate Registrar, spent three days on campus with their Stellic implementation manager and a small team from IT. Together they set up integrations, mapped data, and built 30 of 55 majors within six weeks. Weekly meetings kept the project moving, and asynchronous collaboration tools allowed on‑the‑fly requirement tweaks. By March—just nine months from kickoff—Stellic was live for degree audit and planning.

At Wesleyan, word of mouth beats broadcast emails. To build buy‑in, Josh and Amanda embarked on what they called the “Stellic reality tour.” They visited departmental meetings, faculty lunches, student houses and dorms, demonstrating the tool and listening to concerns. Instead of a top‑down mandate, they opted for transparency and hands‑on problem solving. When a department discovered that its audit rules were outdated, the team updated the requirements in real time as faculty watched the audit refresh instantly on the screen. The team also held open sessions to ensure everyone had a chance for in-person learning. This grassroots approach was tailored to Wesleyan’s tight-knit culture, where personal connection matters more than broad announcements. Skeptics started to embrace the flexibility the tool provided.

Josh’s team is already seeing early impact from Stellic:

• Multiple majors: Over 50% of Wesleyan students pursue double majors—a level of complexity their old systems couldn’t support. With Stellic, those programs are tracked accurately from day one.
• Planning ahead with flexibility: Within the first semester of launch, 20% of sophomores mapped at least one major or minor in Stellic without any promotion. Students are already using it to test out different paths before declaring.
• Exploring different combinations: Students can now map multiple scenarios—double majors, minors, and future courses—well before declaring. That flexibility helps them explore options with confidence instead of waiting until junior year to piece it together. Since using Stellic, students have added almost 600 programs to their 4 year plans.
• Fast and light on IT: Wesleyan went from kickoff to student launch in just 9 months (in what could’ve been 5, if not for the simultaneous implementation work), with only two IT staff involved.

Wesleyan is now preparing for live registration that will allow students to register directly from their plans with appropriate guardrails, while also transitioning graduation clearance from brittle forms to an interactive workflow that surfaces potential issues early.