Academic Units

Academic units, or AUs, are the primary organizational structure in Workday Student. They are used to represent schools, divisions, or any other unit that admits students, offers programs of study, or offers courses. AUs are structured together to manage academic process flows, security access, Workday rule inheritance, and reporting. 

Academic units overview

Workday is built on a network of structures that streamlines sequences of tasks (also called business processes or workflow routing) and facilitates reporting at both a summary and detailed level.  Academic units, or AUs, are the primary organizational structure in Workday Student, akin to supervisory organizations (sup orgs) for Workday HCM and the foundation data model (FDM) in Workday Finance. 

AUs are used in Workday to represent schools, departments, or any other unit that admits students, offers programs of study, or offers courses. AUs also hold a faculty member’s academic appointment, which is different from their position. 

Academic unit structure

Within Workday, related AUs are organized together to form the academic unit structure. The AU structure: 

• Determines process/workflow routing for student tasks and transactions, like tuition payments or course registration 
• Drives security access, like who can remove advising holds for which students
• Determines which Workday rules – like academic calendars, grading policies, and student payment types – apply to which academic units

Like supervisory organizations in Workday HCM, AUs can be designated as superior or subordinate to one another to form tiered relationships. Within the academic unit structure, Workday rules assigned to a superior academic unit are inherited by some or all the academic units below it in the structure, depending on the rule. 

Academic levels

AUs, paired with academic levels, are comparable to how we use academic divisions in our legacy student information system (SIS). WashU has two academic levels: graduate and undergraduate. 

For each academic level within an AU, Workday follows specific rules or policies that are effective dated for version tracking. For example, a department’s AU may have certain grading policies apply only to undergraduate students and not to graduate students. Similarly, security can be assigned so that an administrator has access to only graduate student data and not undergraduate. This eliminates the need for separate AUs for those two student populations.

AU structure for McKelvey School of Engineering

Academic unit inheritance  

Academic unit (AU)/academic level policies apply to subordinate AUs unless separate policies are set up for those units. We refer to this top-down cascade as inheritance. WashU is the highest-level owning AU in the academic unit structure.  

 For example, any policy configured at the McKelvey School of Engineering AU will be inherited by its subordinate AUs. If an instructor’s eligibility is configured at the McKelvey AU, the instructor could teach any engineering course.  

Animation showing an instructor assigned at the McKelvey School of Engineering academic unit “inheriting” access to all subordinate academic units 

However, if the school administration only wants the instructor to teach electrical and systems engineering, they could “break” the inheritance and configure the instructor’s eligibility directly at the Electrical & Systems Engineering AU.  

Animation showing an instructor assigned to the Electrical & Systems Engineering academic unit  

Academic load and class standing are the same for most schools (divisions) and therefore are configured at the top level (WashU AU). These configurations are inherited by all school AUs and their subordinate AUs.