A provost asks for a current admissions funnel by program. The advancement office pulls a donor giving report ahead of a board meeting. Both numbers come back wrong, not because Salesforce failed, but because the org quietly stopped matching how the institution actually works months earlier. Nobody flagged it, because the workaround, an extra spreadsheet kept “just in case,” had already become normal.
This is the pattern we see most often at STG when a mid-size college or university brings us in for a Salesforce health check: not a system that’s broken, but one that’s drifted. The org was configured correctly at go-live. Then the admissions cycle changed. An advancement campaign restructured its giving stages. Two people who understood the original automation left for other jobs. The configuration never caught up.
The math behind the drift
Salesforce orgs accumulate configuration the way buildings accumulate wiring: each addition is reasonable at the time, and the sum becomes hard to trace later. The 2026 SF Ben Salesforce Admin Survey found that 56.3% of admins name technical debt as the single hardest part of their job, and 30.7% describe their org’s technical debt as “high” or “very high.” Only 2% call their org clean and well maintained. That survey draws from Salesforce admins across industries, not higher education specifically, but the mechanism it describes, changes accumulating faster than anyone has time to track, applies with more force on a campus, where the admin managing admissions or advancement data is often a part-time role stacked on top of other duties rather than a dedicated architect.
The 2025 Salesforce Talent Ecosystem Report from 10K Advisors backs this up from the hiring side. Demand for technical and solution architects, the specialists who get called in to fix exactly this kind of drift, grew 27% and 21% respectively in 2025, a trend the report attributes to “years of fragmented org growth without architectural oversight.” Institutions aren’t unique in producing that pattern. They’re simply less staffed to catch it early.
That staffing gap shows up in higher ed research too. EDUCAUSE’s 2025 Technology Leadership Workforce in Higher Education report describes IT leaders managing staff development, system procurement, and project planning against real budget and headcount constraints. On most campuses, that means the person responsible for the Salesforce org supporting admissions or advancement is not a full-time platform architect. It’s someone absorbing configuration requests between other responsibilities.
Eighteen months is roughly when that gap becomes visible. It covers one full admissions cycle and one full annual giving cycle. It’s usually enough time for at least one Salesforce platform release to change behavior underneath automation nobody has revisited. And on many campuses, it’s enough time for the person who originally built a given workflow rule to have moved to a new job, taking the reasoning behind it with them.
What drift actually looks like
Drift rarely shows up as an error message. It shows up as small, disconnected symptoms that each look minor on their own.
- Stale field mappings. A form or import still maps to a field the institution stopped using two terms ago, so new data lands somewhere nobody checks.
- Unmonitored workflow rules and flows. Automation built for a prior recruitment funnel keeps firing, sending the wrong stage notification or none at all, because no one owns a regular review of what’s still active.
- Orphaned automations after staff turnover. The person who understood why a validation rule exists leaves, and the rule stays in place long after the process it protected has changed, quietly blocking or misrouting records.
- Report definitions built on assumptions that no longer hold. A report filters on a status value the team stopped using, so it returns a number that looks plausible and is wrong.
- Duplicate and unmerged donor or applicant records. Two records for the same person, created through disconnected entry points, split giving history or application history in ways that don’t surface until someone cross-references by hand.
None of these breaks the system outright. Staff notice a report looks off, stop trusting it, and start keeping a separate spreadsheet instead. That workaround is the real cost. It’s not a technical failure. It’s a slow transfer of institutional trust away from the system of record and into someone’s inbox.
Run a Salesforce health check this week
A full audit isn’t necessary to get a read on where an org stands. A lean IT team can run this in an afternoon.
- Pull the login and adoption report. In Setup, check which admissions or advancement staff have logged in over the last 30 days. Low use by the people the system is built for is one of the earliest signals of a workaround already in progress.
- List active flows and process builders and ask who owns each one. If nobody in the room can explain what a given automation does or why, it’s a candidate for review or retirement.
- Check field usage. Salesforce’s field usage tool shows which custom fields are populated on less than 10% of records. A high count of near-empty fields usually means the process that used to fill them has changed.
- Run the duplicate rule report. If duplicate and matching rules haven’t been reviewed since go-live, check how many records exist for the same person across source systems that feed the org.
- Re-run last year’s board or provost report from scratch. Compare the result to what’s on file from last time. A gap between the two usually means a definition drifted somewhere upstream.
A surprise on any one of these is a reason to look closer, not a reason to panic. Most orgs we’ve reviewed for admissions and advancement teams show two or three of these signs by month eighteen. That’s the design of a flexible platform meeting the reality of how a campus actually runs, not a failure of the original implementation.
Where this goes from here
A health check doesn’t need to be a multi-month engagement to be worth doing. STG’s approach starts with exactly the five checks above, done properly, with a short written account of what we find and what matters most to fix first. Institutions that catch drift at month eighteen spend a fraction of what it costs to rebuild trust in a system after a provost has already asked why the numbers don’t match.
If your admissions or advancement team has started keeping a shadow spreadsheet “just in case,” that habit is worth a conversation before it hardens into the default way of working. We’re happy to walk through what a health check would look for in your org, no commitment required.
Sources
- Salesforce Admins Are Drowning in Technical Debt: It’s Time to Address It – Salesforce Ben, 2026 SF Ben Salesforce Admin Survey
- The State of the Salesforce Job Market in 2025/26 According to the 10K Report – Salesforce Ben, citing 10K Advisors’ 2025 Salesforce Talent Ecosystem Report
- 2025 EDUCAUSE Technology Leadership Workforce in Higher Education – EDUCAUSE
