I would love to know the story of how this wretched piece of software seems to have embedded itself into nearly every college and university in the United States.
The 4 ways to spend money[1], in this case, spending someone else's money on someone else. Likely a procurement person with no IT knowledge, who never has to deal with the painful solution, but got wined and dined by the salesman.
No surprise that it is backed by Oracle. The sales people at Oracle are really good at getting technology inept people/businesses into multi year contracts.
Once they started citing the list of features in their hundred slide presentation, the administrator stood no chance.
PeopleSoft was one of the larger players, at least in education, well before Oracle bought them. There's really (or at least there was when I was involved in higher education) only 3 main players at that level. And trust me, each option you had was bad in its own way.
The problem is that these products started out much smaller, and grew to fill the needs, although not necessarily as nicely as you might like. So now when it's time to put out a new bid, there's just the handful of vendors who can check off all the boxes for what the current system does. And integration with other systems is always a pain - even today it often includes csv or tab-delimited files that get sent to ftp sites for batch processing!
[1] https://investorjunkie.com/economics/milton-friedman-ways-sp...