Enlistment was broken before it even started.
This was a common sentiment among Lasallians of all ID numbers and programs ahead of the online enlistment on Archers Hub. The site—announced in March 2025 and launched in January 2026 for undergraduate and graduate students—was supposed to be an improvement over the old systems of My.Lasalle (MLS) and Animo.Sys, but ironically saw students asking for their return.
Enlistment and its issues are nothing new. During the 1980s, articles recounted students’ struggles with in-person enlistment, and when enlistment went digital, The LaSallian reported on a return to MLS after the failed rollout of Animo.Sys in 2014.
However, the implementation of Archers Hub, together with its myriad of problems, begs two questions: was it truly a step forward or a step backward? Was Archers Hub truly prepared to handle students’ worst nightmare?
Migration in progress
The troubles began when the site’s launch was accompanied by a two-month-long migration of academic and financial information from the University’s previous systems. However, this also put transactions on hold, delaying tuition payments and document requests. The move resulted in several extensions to payment deadlines and course dropping. Some students even reported surcharges, which reportedly jumped from P50 to P100, then P500, then to P1000, despite paying tuition on time.
The extension of payment deadlines and waiving of fees could only do so much. This data could have been migrated long before the site was launched, so that students would not need to worry about any clearance holds or surprises that cost more than they could afford.
Save and next
Lasallians took to different social media platforms to voice out their complaints on the new system—not because it was new and unfamiliar—but because it was broken from the very beginning.
There were doubts about the site’s capability of handling thousands of students at the same time, which was one of the main problems with Animo.Sys. Confidence in the new system did not improve as late as the first day of enlistment, because students reported courses from the previous term not yet even being credited. Missing minor programs and shiftees’ new programs were not being reflected as well. For a site reportedly meant for use by Term 3, these shortcomings only added more to the many frustrations students had about it.
During enlistment, various errors would appear as early as the first step, coupled with the incredibly slow speed amid high traffic. Understandably, students became frustrated when the site had to undergo sudden maintenance during their enrollment schedules, which even led to enlistment schedules being pushed back several days.
The Project Ascension Team in charge of the transition from MLS and Animo.Sys, previously hosted mock enrollment sessions the week before the actual enlistment. It aimed to help students become familiar with the enlistment process of Archers Hub, yet it did not prepare students to handle its many technical problems. Even during these sessions, students criticized the team for using them as free quality assurance. It also did not help that the mock site and processes were slow. For instance, the one-time passwords took a long time to reach students’ emails, only to not work when typed and verified. Among more of these issues with a rush fix was the initial disappearance of the ID number and college staggering found on Animo.Sys, which was helpful in resolving user traffic. When students noted their absence, only they were added back into the process.
As the problems piled on, long queues of students visited Rooms G304 and G306 of Gokongwei Hall, as a face-to-face appointment there was the only place to directly contact the Project Ascension Team. This arrangement was inconvenient for students like myself who lived far from the campus, making them opt to ask friends to come in their stead and report these issues to the help desk. Lines stretched as far as the second floor, with some students complaining that they could not leave, fearing that they would lose their spot in the line. Soon, online channels from the University for addressing concerns were only opened during the Add/Drop period, defeating the point of having them open for enlistment in the first place.
Having experienced this slowness and crashes firsthand, I echoed other students’ sentiments on the site’s traffic-handling capabilities. In a previous interview with the publication, a representative from Project Ascension claimed that the move “will help us better manage high volumes of transactions, especially during peak enrollment periods,” only for the real-world implementation to fail this promise. If Archers Hub was meant to improve student experience, how come it felt like nothing much changed, or even got worse?
Final Submit
Even if an investigation will be conducted for the sake of future updates, it does not erase the major inconvenience many students had to go through just to enlist in their classes. It does a disservice to students who pay DLSU’s high tuition fee, only to not see any major improvements in something as important as enlistment, which determines how we would spend the next term in this university.
If a system as vital as Archers Hub was not ready for release, the administration could have just said so, and it could have saved students a hefty amount of time and effort on a system that did not work properly. Delaying a system when it is not ready will always be an option, especially for a university as big and well-funded as DLSU.
No matter the system, Lasallians always fight a losing battle with enlistment. Before the developers add any more features, they must address the elephant in the room—the traffic that stops the site entirely, together with the data transfer which doesn’t reflect at the most crucial moments. But above all, as soon as possible, they must listen to the voices of the students whose time, effort, and energy are used for important things such as enlistment, for there to be an improved experience for all.