MCP Architecture Guide for Higher Education: Connecting Campus Systems to AI Agents

1. The Campus Data Problem

A typical university runs between five and fifteen core systems. The LMS (Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle, Open edX, Brightspace) holds courses, grades, and engagement data. The SIS (Banner, Colleague, PeopleSoft, Workday Student, Jenzabar) holds enrollment records, academic standing, and credit hours. Advising platforms track alerts, interventions, and caseloads. Degree audit tools manage requirements and what-if scenarios. CRM systems (Slate, Salesforce, Ellucian CRM) handle prospect pipelines and yield tracking. Financial aid systems manage awards, packaging, and FAFSA status.

Each of these systems has its own API, its own authentication model, its own data schema, and its own rate limits. Some expose REST endpoints. Others use SOAP or batch file exports. Identity is federated through Shibboleth, CAS, SAML, or Azure AD — often with different role models per system.

The result: every new initiative — a retention dashboard, an advising workflow, an AI-powered chatbot — re-solves the integration problem from scratch. A six-month project becomes a twelve-month project because half the work is plumbing, not functionality.

Model Context Protocol (MCP) fixes this. You build one thin wrapper per system (an "MCP server"), add a broker that routes and governs requests, and then any application or agent can ask cross-system questions through a single, stable interface. This guide walks through how to do it for a university.

2. Inventory Your Campus Systems

Before writing any code, build a complete picture of your campus systems. For each system, document API availability, authentication model, rate limits, and data sensitivity (especially FERPA classification).

For each row, document three additional details: the authentication model (OAuth 2.0, API keys, service accounts), rate limits and quotas (requests per minute, daily caps, pagination behavior), and FERPA data classification. Student education records are protected under FERPA, which means every tool that touches this data must enforce role-based access and produce an audit trail.

You do not need to wrap every system on day one. Pick the two or three sources that matter most for your first use case — typically LMS and SIS — and start there. You can add more MCP servers later without changing any existing applications.

3. Build MCP Servers for Each System

An MCP server is a thin wrapper around one system's API. It exposes that system's capabilities as "tools" — structured operations with defined inputs, outputs, permissions, and audit behavior. One server per system. When Banner ships a breaking API change, you update one server and nothing else breaks.

Example: cross-system academic standing tool

Some tools pull from a single system. Others combine data from two or more sources at the MCP server level. Here is a pseudocode example for a tool that pulls academic standing from both LMS and SIS:

mcp_server.add_tool(
    name="get_student_academic_standing",
    description="Return combined academic standing for a
                student: current grades from LMS, enrollment
                status and GPA from SIS",
    parameters=["student_id", "term_code"],
    handler=lambda params: {
        "lms": lms_client.get_grades(params["student_id"], params["term_code"]),
        "sis": sis_client.get_enrollment(params["student_id"], params["term_code"]),
    },
    policy={
        "rbac": ["advising.read", "registrar.read", "instructor.own_students"],
        "ferpa": True,
        "pii_minimization": True,
        "audit": True,
        "deny_by_default": True
    }
)

Notice the policy block. The tool requires one of three roles: advising.read, registrar.read, or instructor.own_students (scoped to only students in that instructor's sections). FERPA compliance is flagged explicitly. PII minimization strips unnecessary personal data from the response. Every call is audited with requester identity, parameters, timestamp, and outcome.

Security defaults for every MCP server

• Scoped service accounts — each server authenticates with its own credentials, scoped to only the operations it needs. The LMS MCP server cannot query the SIS directly.
• Deny-by-default tool exposure — tools must be explicitly enabled. No open-ended API passthrough. If a tool is not registered, it does not exist.
• PII minimization — validate input parameters before calling the upstream API. Filter PII from responses. Return only what the requester's role permits.
• Audit logging — every tool call is logged: requester identity, tool name, parameters, timestamp, outcome. Logs are immutable and routed to your SIEM. FERPA requires this for student data access.
• Request signing / mTLS — mutual TLS between the broker and servers so both sides verify identity. No plaintext transport.

4. Add an MCP Broker

With individual MCP servers in place, the broker is the layer that ties them together. Applications and agents talk to the broker; the broker routes requests to the right MCP server, enforces policy, caches responses, and provides observability.

What the broker does

• Routes queries — the agent asks for a student's grades and the broker forwards the call to the LMS MCP server. It asks for enrollment status and the broker routes to the SIS MCP server.
• Enforces FERPA-compliant RBAC — before forwarding any call, the broker checks the requester's role against the tool's policy. An advisor sees advising data. A registrar sees registration data. A faculty member sees only their own students. Financial aid staff see aid data but not advising notes.
• Caches responses — avoids hammering upstream APIs with repeated identical queries. Configurable TTL per tool. Cached data inherits the same access controls as live data.
• Observability hooks — logs every request and response. Feeds metrics to your monitoring stack (Prometheus, Datadog, Splunk). Track query patterns, latency, error rates.
• Rate limiting — protects source systems from overload. Configurable per server, per tool, per requester. Critical for Banner and PeopleSoft, which have strict API quotas.

Role-based data access

The broker is where FERPA compliance is operationalized. Different campus roles see different data:

• Academic advisors — grades, enrollment, degree progress, advising notes, intervention history for students in their caseload.
• Registrar staff — enrollment, standing, holds, credits, transfer evaluations for any student.
• Faculty — grades, assignments, engagement for students enrolled in their sections only.
• Financial aid counselors — aid awards, packaging, FAFSA status, satisfactory academic progress. No access to advising notes or health records.
• Enrollment management — CRM prospect data, yield metrics, admitted student engagement. No access to enrolled student academic records.

5. Connect Agents and Ask Cross-System Questions

Once the broker is running, any MCP-compatible agent can connect to it. The agent sees a list of available tools (from all connected MCP servers, filtered by the requester's role) and can call whichever tools it needs to answer a question.

This is where the architecture pays off. When an advisor asks "How is this student doing?" the agent can:

1. Call get_student_course_status on the LMS MCP server — returns current grades and missing work for each course.
2. Call get_enrollment_standing on the SIS MCP server — returns enrollment status, cumulative GPA, and credit hours completed.
3. Call get_degree_progress on the Degree Audit MCP server — returns requirements completed vs. remaining and estimated graduation term.
4. Combine the three responses into a single, coherent answer.

The agent does not need to know how Canvas's REST API works, what Banner's endpoint structure looks like, or how to authenticate to either system. It calls stable tool names, and the MCP servers handle the rest. When you add a new system — say, financial aid — existing agents automatically gain access to new tools without any code changes.

6. Example: Unified Academic Standing

An academic advisor opens the advising copilot and types: "How is Jordan Martinez doing this semester?"

What happens behind the scenes

1. The agent recognizes this is an academic standing question and calls three tools through the broker:
   • get_student_course_status (LMS) — returns current grades, missing assignments, last activity date per course.
   • get_enrollment_standing (SIS) — returns enrollment status, cumulative GPA, credit hours completed, any holds.
   • get_degree_progress (Degree Audit) — returns requirements completed vs. remaining, estimated graduation term.
2. The broker checks that the advisor has the advising.read role and that Jordan Martinez is in the advisor's caseload. It logs the request and forwards each call to the appropriate MCP server.
3. Each MCP server calls its upstream API, filters the response for PII minimization, and returns structured data.
4. The agent combines the three responses into a single answer:

The advisor got a cross-system answer in seconds. No one had to build a custom dashboard or write a report. The data came from three separate systems, governed by FERPA-compliant RBAC at every step, with a complete audit trail of who accessed what and when.

7. Example: Early Intervention Alerts

Instead of waiting for an advisor to ask, MCP enables automated cross-system monitoring that detects at-risk students and routes alerts with full context.

How the flow works

1. LMS detects a trigger. A scheduled workflow calls get_students_with_missing_assignments on the LMS MCP server. It returns students with 2 or more missed assignments in any course.
2. SIS confirms enrollment. For each flagged student, the agent calls get_enrollment_standing on the SIS MCP server to confirm the student is still actively enrolled (not withdrawn or on leave).
3. Advising platform checks history. The agent calls get_student_interventions on the Advising MCP server to check if a prior intervention is already in progress for this student. If so, the existing advisor is notified with updated context rather than creating a duplicate alert.
4. Alert routed to advisor. The agent generates a summary with data from all three systems — missing assignments, current grades, enrollment status, prior intervention history — and routes it to the assigned advisor's queue. The advisor sees the full picture, not just "student missed assignments."

Every step is logged. The advisor can see exactly which systems contributed to the alert, what data was accessed, and when. If a FERPA audit is requested, the institution has a complete record.

8. Example: Enrollment Yield Campaign

MCP is not limited to enrolled students. Enrollment management teams can use cross-system queries to run more effective yield campaigns for admitted students who have not yet deposited.

How the flow works

1. CRM identifies the cohort. The agent calls get_admitted_no_deposit on the CRM MCP server (Slate, Salesforce, or Ellucian CRM) to pull admitted students who have not submitted a deposit. It returns student profiles with program interest, home state, and inquiry history.
2. LMS shows engagement signals. For each admitted student, the agent calls get_prospect_engagement on the LMS MCP server to check if the student has viewed campus tour content, attended a virtual info session, or interacted with pre-enrollment course previews.
3. Financial aid provides context. The agent calls get_aid_package_status on the Financial Aid MCP server to check whether the student has been packaged, whether the package has been viewed, and whether there are outstanding documents.
4. Personalized outreach generated. The agent composes a personalized message grounded in the student's specific program interest, engagement history, and financial aid status. A student who viewed Computer Science content and has an unviewed aid package gets a different message than one who attended a Nursing info session and has outstanding FAFSA verification documents.

Every outreach action is logged and auditable. The institution can demonstrate that outreach was grounded in legitimate enrollment interest signals, not random batch messaging. Admitted student data access is governed by the same RBAC policies — enrollment management staff see prospect and admitted student data but cannot access enrolled student academic records.

9. Security Checklist for Higher Education

MCP does not move or replicate data — it provides a standardized query interface to systems that already hold the data. But the interface itself must be locked down. This checklist is specific to FERPA-regulated higher education environments. Complete every item before going to production: