Tempe, Arizona – The Kuali Student Services System project announced 
today that it has received a $2.5 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to advance 
the development of a new open source Student Services System for colleges and universities.  
The announcement was made at the Kuali Days Conference in Tempe, Arizona.

Ted Dodds, CIO of The University of British Columbia and one of the founding partners of the 
project, said:  “We’re grateful to the Mellon Foundation for their investment in what promises to be 
a landmark Student Services System, a system that will provide cost effective support for 
students and simplify administrative tasks.  This grant will help our planning team move on to the 
next level of development.”

The Kuali Student Services Project is a partnership of five founding institutions:  
• The University of British Columbia 
• The University of California, Berkeley 
• The University of Maryland, College Park 
• Florida State University 
• San Joaquin Delta College in California.

Two other institutions - Carnegie Mellon University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 
– will also contribute significant resources and expertise to the project.

The Associate Vice Chancellor of UC Berkeley, Susanna Castillo-Robson commented:  "Kuali 
Student is more than just a new student administrative application; rather it goes beyond the 
technology to enable a dynamic student-centric approach between higher education and our 
learning communities."

“With this award” she added, “the Mellon Foundation is inspiring our team to develop 
a superb higher education information system that will help students identify and achieve their 
goals.”  

Kuali Student will be a modular, open source, standards-based system.  The first Kuali Student 
Service modules are expected to be released in 2009.  All software and materials will be available 
under the Education Community License, and can be adopted by colleges and universities 
around the world without licensing fees.

Kuali Student is being developed under the umbrella of the Kuali Foundation.  This affiliation 
allows the project to leverage and contribute to the Foundation’s communities of interest, and 
Kuali’s full suite of community source applications for higher-education institutions.  

“The Kuali Student project joins other projects of the Kuali Foundation, Inc., as a means of 
colleges and universities solving our software needs together,” noted Brad Wheeler, Chairman of 
the Foundation.  Wheeler also announced that Ted Dodds and Shelton Waggener, University of 
California, Berkeley CIO, were recently appointed to the Kuali Foundation Board of Directors.

-30-

For more information, contact: 
Cath Fairlie, Kuali Student Program Director                       604-822-5731        (www.kuali.org/communities/ks
Brad Wheeler, Chairman, Kuali Foundation                         812-855-3478       (www.kuali.org
Ira H. Fuchs, VP for Research in Information Technology      212-838-8400       (www.mellon.org)