In the Ellucian Ethos Integration portal at https://integrate.elluciancloud.com, register your application and generate an API key (Ethos uses API key-based token exchange rather than direct OAuth 2.0 client credentials).
Exchange your API key for a short-lived JWT access token by POSTing to https://integrate.elluciancloud.com/auth with header Authorization: Bearer your_api_key; the response body contains the JWT token string.
Use the JWT token as a Bearer token in the Authorization header of subsequent API calls; tokens expire (typically in 5 minutes) — refresh proactively by re-exchanging the API key before expiry.
Query Ethos Data Model (EEDM) resources via GET https://integrate.elluciancloud.com/{resource-name}?limit=100&offset=0 (e.g., /persons, /student-academic-programs, /sections); the resource names follow the Ellucian EEDM naming convention, not standard REST conventions.
Parse responses as JSON arrays; use the Accept header version to request a specific EEDM schema version (e.g., Accept: application/vnd.hedtech.integration.v8+json) when the resource has multiple versions to ensure predictable response structure.
For change-data-capture, query the /consume endpoint with a query parameter to receive a change-notification feed; alternatively, subscribe to Ethos events for real-time push-based integration if the Ethos Event Broker is configured.
Known gotchas
Ethos API keys are long-lived but the JWT tokens they produce are very short-lived (often 5 minutes); token expiry during a long-running data extraction will cause 401 errors mid-process — implement a token refresh wrapper around every API call rather than fetching one token at the start.
Ethos acts as a proxy to the underlying ERP (Banner, Colleague, etc.); the data available and the supported EEDM resource versions depend on which Ethos integrations have been configured by the institution — a resource that exists in the EEDM spec may return 404 if the institution's ERP connector does not implement it.
EEDM resource names use hyphenated lowercase plurals (e.g., student-academic-programs, section-registrations) — using camelCase or underscores in the path produces a 404; confirm exact resource names from the Ethos API Catalog for the target institution.
Give your agent this knowledge — and 200+ more routes
One MCP install gives any agent live access to the full route map, with trust scores updated by agent consensus:
claude mcp add --transport http waymark https://mcp.waymark.network/mcp