Campus management systems are the software that runs a school, a college or a university: the student records, the courses, admissions, the hostel and the campus card. Every college student meets them through the college portal. It is where you check your attendance and marks, pay your fees, and download your hall ticket before an exam. Many Indian colleges call the whole portal the college ERP.
Consider a second-year B.Tech student at an engineering college in Nashik, a week before the semester exams. She logs in to the portal and sees that her attendance in Thermodynamics is 73%. Her university requires 75% to sit the exam, so she asks her teacher to record two days of medical leave. She then pays the semester fee of ₹58,000 by UPI through the portal. The next morning, her hall ticket is ready to download. It shows her exam seat number, the exam timetable and her photo.
Each of these screens reads from a different system. The two zones of this scene hold them.
The first zone is the student information and learning systems. The student information system (SIS) holds the record of every student: admission, attendance, timetable, marks, fees and the final transcript. The portal mostly shows what is in the SIS. The learning management system (LMS) is where each course lives online. Teachers post notes and assignments there, and students submit their work. The university ERP runs the institution's own money and staff: accounts, purchasing, payroll and HR.
The second zone is admissions and student services. Admissions management software takes an applicant from the first enquiry to enrolment. Other systems run the hostel, the campus ID card that pays in the canteen, and the college's contact with its former students.
Indian institutions now also connect these systems to national ones. Under the UGC's rules, the credits that each student earns are stored in the Academic Bank of Credits (ABC), against an APAAR ID, a lifelong 12-digit student ID. Degrees and marksheets are issued into DigiLocker, where an employer can check them. These national systems are examples of digital public infrastructure. The figures that a college sends for the NIRF rankings, such as the number of students and their placements, also come from its campus systems.
Who buys this software? Colleges, universities and school boards buy it slowly, often through tenders. Then they keep it for many years, because moving every student's records to a new system is risky. The SIS is the institution's system of record: the one database that it treats as the official version of each student's history. The largest companies in this market are American, and they sell mainly to schools and universities in the United States. Several of them build their products with engineers in Bengaluru and Chennai.
The newest change is AI. An AI tutor inside the LMS answers students' questions at any hour, and admissions systems now read every application.