[Telemakhos]

I guess I have three questions here.

1) What happened to the days when universities published their own software, like pine from UW? It seems like Washington of St Louis, which offers a PhD in computer science, should have some students capable of writing a database to run the university.

2) Why have universities not collaborated to develop a modular, expandable system for running a university, instead of putting themselves at the mercy of Workforce, SAS, etc?

3) These same processes were at some point in the past handled on paper, for far less than $16k/student. At what point did the university so lose its organizational competence that the filing system (that's what a database is) ate the budget?

[justanotherbody]

1 - based off of my experiences both using and maintaining various infra at the University of Washington the problem is not finding talent to write software, it's the part that comes after. Maintenance, updates, et al.

A common theme is limited or no budget for updating or expanding systems such that the go from "nice" to "acceptable" to "clunky" and then worse.

Politics also becomes an issue. That aged home rolled service might have a palpable price tag to fund a major update for, but once you do discovery and scope every specialized integration made for every department and reality sets in. Whatever path is chosen is going to burn a number of parties, and using a vendor provides a baseline for functionality and a convenient scapegoat

2 - see federated auth via shibboleth, or any number of incommon tech. Or even Kerberos

This stuff exists and often works well, but brings it's own operational maintenance challenges and required specialized skill sets.

3 - only a subset of these processes were handled on paper. expectations on both the timelines and breadth of services have gone up significantly since this was all on paper

[hshdhdhj4444]

I suspect $260mm wouldn’t just solve all those problems for a single university, but for all Universities across the nation, assuming the software is being written with an open ethos and to benefit all universities like suggested by the OP.

This reminds me of how a small team of U.S. seniors provided WiFi to basically the entire D1 football stadium for our college (at a time this hadn’t been done before), for < $10k (we used the grant to buy whatever we couldn’t get used from various departments), had it working in what may have been a first for a college stadium of that size, only for it to be completely scrapped and the university spending tens of millions to replace it with a new commercial system that didn’t even work as well and had a higher per game support fee than the cost of running our entire system for the whole season.

Unrelated to this (but maybe still explaining why), the college president was suspected of having sent contracts to “friends” who had significantly overcharged the university for years.

[basket_horse]

It’s not rocket science, but you’re vastly underestimating what it takes to run a modern university. Not to mention things like security and support, which a university is not setup well to handle in house. The phds should be spending their time learning and doing research, not managing admin software.

[karencarits]

> The phds should be spending their time learning and doing research, not managing admin software

I guess we could also flip it and ask why don't we offer PhDs in developing software for public administration?

[basket_horse]

It’s engineering, not research

[andrewbutts]

PhD in engineering is a thing

[UncleMeat]

That is still a research position.

[browningstreet]

I went to an Arizona university in the 90s and our class registration system was far more customizable and feature-ful than what my son lives with now. His university has half the students mine did and they, across two decades, shared a university president.

I think it might also be something else.

[rayiner]

That reminds me of the Pharoh’s sorcerers in Prince of Egypt. Maybe we aren’t underestimating anything and these organizations are just dysfunctional because the federal government gives them a blank check with student loans?

WUSTL has 20,000 students and faculty. This is not a big organization. To manage that, they have over 17,000 administrators. Meanwhile, the Pentagon in 1941, at the start of US involvement in WWII, had only 24,000 civilian employees to manage over a million soldiers.

[musicale]

Universities will respond that regulatory compliance is more complex and costly every year, and that student services costs are also increasing continuously (and cannot be cut if a university wishes to remain competitive). They may also say that with faculty not wishing to take on administrative roles (which take time away from research and teaching and do not help with tenure cases) the university needs to hire more full-time administrators.

Some universities will also claim that the average financial contribution for students and families has not increased, in spite of tuition and fees outpacing inflation for half a century or more and student loan debt reaching $1.6T.

But any large bureaucratic organization tends to seek expansion of its staff, budget, and influence, and that is likely a core reason for the dramatic increase in non-teaching university staff.

[lotsofpulp]

> At what point did the university so lose its organizational competence that the filing system (that's what a database is) ate the budget?

Federal taxpayers underwrite unlimited amounts of money to the university’s customers. Why would the university’s leaders not take advantage of this and enlarge their kingdoms as much as possible? The bigger the budget, the bigger the university employees’ cut (incl the board).

[natas]

1) Because Leadership knows they don't have the competency to manage a project of this size, universities have become expensive adult daycares.

2) See (1) and also because AI can't do it, so they can't handle.

3) Because paper kills trees, and brawndo contains electrolytes, duh.

[wongarsu]

To quote the university's website:

> Washington University's Executive MBA (EMBA) program provides a holistic approach to managing people, projects, and budgets. It is designed to meet the needs of middle- and senior-level professionals who seek to exercise true organizational leadership in dynamic and changing business environments

Sounds like the perfect people to manage your software projects. Not sure if you'd get a professor, hire phds or make it a student-run program, but surely something can be arranged. Maybe they can even rope in the people from the Information Systems Management courses

[lubujackson]

I have some context here, as my dad used to work at a state college running "the systems". There was era of thin clients and a centralized VAX machine or similar that did all the work. I remember weekends where my dad had to work because they were "running the numbers" which involved calculating grades and producing end of semester reports and such. Somehow this took more than a day of processing for a few thousans students and ran on a big tape machine. Sometimes it would crash or something so someone had to be there to keep things moving.

I don't remember all the details, but this is what they used up til the mid-90s. By then, I could probably run something on my 486 home computer that would complete in half an hour. But there were decades of process and customization embedded in these systems.

When modernization happened, it was swift. My dad was lucky with the timing as he was retiring during the transition so even made bonus money coming back as a consultant. But you can imagine that even if the new software was pricey and not as customizable, the speed improvements and reduction in staff made sense.

Once the old staff was cleared out, there was no department of staff being paid to build computer services, only the lesser staff needed to maintain and use it. The issue was that hardware/Internet usage expanded too fast, the importance and reliance on tech grew and it became a selling point for unis to have the newest systems in place.

It makes sense now for the pendulum to swing in the other direction, as customization and cost are wildly out of balance with AI and the latent tech workforce available at every college.

I would say the blocker now is the same as what allowed creaky old systems to persist into the 90s - administration doesn't give a shit about any of this and it is only viewed as a cost center. Until differentiating through customization provides an obvious and immediate fiscal benefit to the admins themselves, most unis won't look at changing off their shitty landlord systems until they are basically forced to by the market.

[pknomad]

I work at a lab associated with R1 university that has Nobel laureate output so I feel like I have some knowledge in this area:

1. They exist. However, writing a piece of software is not the same thing as supporting them, especially when it comes to dealing with core HR system. This is where SaaSs and similar platform offers lot of appeal.

2. Also difficult because everyone has different needs and at some point certain features get prioritized over others. I support a platform that was built in house before I was born. The guy who wrote it is no longer with us and it is cludgy. Any product decisions evolve years of committee meetings before any decision gets made (by which the it may be incorrect or not relevant.)

Every single time I worked for a company that said let’s hiring an engineering team to build a software that is already solved by a market offering, it has never gone well. The in house product never had the same capabilities or had the same sheen.

3. Can’t answer this one other than digitization efforts.

For transparency, a single software engineer budget is $670K+.

[cootsnuck]

> For transparency, a single software engineer budget is $670K+.

Are you saying that the costs to employ a single software engineer is $670K+? If you mean something else then nvm.

Otherwise that's a ridiculous number to use unless you are specifically talking about places with the highest cost of living in the country where a mid-level dev starts at over $200K.

[pknomad]

I am saying that. Salary + taxes + insurance + retirement + other benefits + support cost is around 670k. Salary eats up like 160k of that budget, though.

[robwwilliams]

Please provide a breakdown.

I find this 4X of base salary implausibly high. 2X strikes me as closer to my reality at a large academic medical center.

[pknomad]

I don't have a breakdown. It was a number cited to me from a manager. Downvotes are interesting.

[Newlaptop]

Payroll taxes on $160k salary are $12,240. Employer contribution to health insurance is maybe $6k - $20k. Retirement maybe $5k. Still under $200k.

Heck of a lot of "support cost" to get to $670k

[HFguy]

Your numbers make sense from what I've seen in private sector. And meet the common sense threshold as well.

Whether the numbers are either wrong or if that is truly what support costs look like at a university would be interesting to know.

[Spivak]

Your first point sounds insane on first blush but after using university software for scheduling it is genuinely pretty difficult to imagine how some cs grads / postdocs turned university employees could do any worse.

I mean students on their own go rogue and make tools for their peers to make it less painful to much fist shaking by the administration.

[colechristensen]

A LOT of major software was written in universities, plenty of the foundational technologies of the Internet included.

[cyberrock]

#1 has to be thought through carefully because ultimately this would involve students being able to access other students' information. It only takes one instance of stalking, harassment, etc. for it to blow up.

[DontchaKnowit]

Theres all kinds of situations wjere students have access to other students personal info in a professional capacity. It is handled like any other situation where this is the case

[Telemakhos]

To add to that, I don't see how students having access to student data is much different from other people having such access. You don't have to be a student to stalk a student: administrators and staff members can be creepy too.

[nacozarina]

There exists a large well-paid army of tech sales ppl whose whole job is to make sure that can never happen.

[hshdhdhj4444]

The real answer is:

the kickbacks are too good.