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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
> 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
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.
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+.
> 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.
I am saying that. Salary + taxes + insurance + retirement + other benefits + support cost is around 670k. Salary eats up like 160k of that budget, though.
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.
#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.
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
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.
Workday, Palantir, ServiceNow - a new generation of Accenture/Oracle et al 'consulting' parasites that wine and dine their way into organisations (and governments) and then bleed them dry. There's a reason software spending endlessly goes up but productivity has flatlined.
These companies exist because non-tech companies building in-house software for their complex workflows also tend to run millions over budget and create brittle, bespoke software.
Also, I wouldn’t put Palantir in the same bucket as Workday and ServiceNow. It’s expensive, but it does work.
So now 'professional management' bring in these firms and instead run hundreds of millions over budget to create brittle, bespoke software. It's profoundly damning on our industry that decades of software development later most productivity gains stopped at about the point Excel and email became widespread. Software has eaten the world('s budgets) with little to show for it. No wonder all these parasites are so excited about AI, another whease to flog to naive orgnaisations that will inevitably spiral in cost, deliver nothing of value and suck more budget from anything useful. Then sell them 'cybersecurity' and 'observability' on top because now their security is Swiss cheese.
I empathize with you, but it’s also worth saying that not all firms are the same. Just as not all in-house teams are the same. There are good ones and bad ones. Even inside firms there are good teams and bad teams. Enterprise software is complex and good software engineers are expensive. These projects are delayed and go over budget because their complexities are grossly underestimated.
ServiceNow is so terrible I genuinely wonder how it is ever deployed anywhere. Seriously, do the purchasers never look at it? Is there no product demo at all during the purchase process? Do the sales people actively hide it or something?
I work in a department that has been using ServiceNow for at least 5 years, and I still do not know how to look up a ticket by ticket number. I just pretend I'm following along when my colleagues reference a ticket.
I just spent a minute poking at it: my dashboard page didn't load, then it told me there are no open tickets in the system, then clicking on a different ticket number to open it didn't do anything, and then the server stopped responding. (Edit: it took 48 seconds to load the ticket.)
They also have a little stopwatch button on some pages that pops up a "Browser Response Time" window that tries to put the blame for slow page load times on the user's browser. Weird, wonder why they need that...
Yes! It always amazes me there seems to be no obvious URL scheme for servicenow.sadcompany.com/<ticket-number> Like, did the developers forget to implement that?
Yeah, and there's no search field, either. Surely, this is my misunderstanding and I should click the "Show Help" icon for a product tutorial, right? This pops up a window saying:
> Now Assist offers real-time guidance and support for users seeking help with Virtual Agent. This feature’s generative AI skills blah blah blah
Ok...? There is no input box to interact with "Now Assist" or the "Virtual Agent", it's just like a marketing blurb for some other feature.
F500, we have a pretty custom ServiceNow, but all I do is put the ticket or any other identifier in the search box and go. Takes 2 seconds to be in the ticket. Granted, that interface sucks too, but I suspect your main problem is internal to your org and the people that configured your ServiceNow.
Your system was configured by muppets if you don’t have a search box - it’s a massive beast that like all enterprise-grade software is a toolbox for you to bend to your will, but the downside is that if your configuration people don’t have empathy for the users (and looking at you especially, contract architects) you end up with a system that is optimised for whoever talks with the vendor, and not for anyone else.
What? Unless someone actively removed the search field, you should have quite a big search field in the top right corner, where you can basically search for anything you'd need.
> my dashboard page didn't load, then it told me there are no open tickets in the system, then clicking on a different ticket number to open it didn't do anything, and then the server stopped responding.
Like all SaaS in-house implementations, this is entirely on how your company's ServiceNow developers.
I've worked on multiple SNOW implementations and things can go really bad when you go crazy with the customizations.
Your comment makes me understand the product even less. So it’s SaaS where you have to develop it yourself? What exactly is the company providing? Why do its customers simultaneously want to outsource this to a vendor and then spend resources customizing it down to the level of “basic CRUD operations work” and “the user sees a search field”?
ServiceNow is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS), not a SaaS, that allows development of new products on top of it.
At its core, there is a workflow management engine that third parties can use to implement their own, stateful, process centric products and services.
We have ServiceNow proper (the CRM) and a completely unrelated to CRM third party product that we have purchased and which is implemented on the ServiceNow platform. Both have nothing to do with each other and are used by different business users.
You don't develop it, you develop on it. SN provides the underlying software, implementations, hosting, upgrades, etc. Salesforce is another example of this.
Not to say that ServiceNow is great, but not being able to type the number into the search bar (top right) sounds more like a user issue than anything else.
I love that ServiceNow has completely broken the back/forward behavior in its own unique way.
Yes, many other sites also break this navigation, but SN takes it to a whole other level.
Want to open and edit multiple records in different tabs? You're a braver soul than I. Better also double check what record you go back to when you click Update. Which is of course different to when you right click and choose Save.
What comes after UI16 for user interface design? Well, UIB, of course. UI16 still looks straight out of 2016.
I, too, made this assumption. Then I learned it was an actual product my ex-employer had selected and kept using.
It still didn't make sense why an enhancement request and a fix request couldn't be moved between queues. Or why I received three (at least) emails when an issue was closed.
> ServiceNow is so terrible I genuinely wonder how it is ever deployed anywhere. Seriously, do the purchasers never look at it?
When I first saw ServiceNow, I was impressed - because my point of comparison (I worked for a university at the time) was BMC Remedy, which was terrible. And some years later I did some consulting for a major bank which was using some 3270-based IBM solution (Tivoli something… I believe it has finally been discontinued) and ServiceNow is light years ahead of that too.
How organizations would pay for Workday baffles me. It is the worst company software I've ever used. It would regularly lose data that managers would input so the best practice amongst EMs was to never put data directly into Workday but instead keep copies elsewhere and only input it into Workday at the last moment. Then if Workday decided to drop your performance feedback you could just paste it again.
It must be really really really good for the HR decision makers though?
> It must be really really really good for the HR decision makers though
Data Integration.
Workday is extremely good at integrating various different data sources and providing support to build integrations if they are not offered by them.
A private research university like WUSTL is a conglomeration of around 10 colleges all of which all have their own internal operations, a couple organizations dedicated to facilities maintenance, an entire community medical network dedicated to STL metro, a major sports program, housing for students and faculty, procurement, insurance, etc.
All of these are entire business units or functionally independent organizations. And in this complexity arises multiple different organically developed data stores, schemas, and practices. At that kind of scale, liability grows exponentially and you as an organization need a way to better understand what is happening.
That is why products like Workday are beloved by enterprises.
I'm surprised to see them on a patchwork of applications still and not already on an enterprise-wide system like Ellucian Banner. I wasn't expecting Workday here, though.
That doesn't quite make sense for a college. Students aren't employees, why are we trying to fit them into the same mold as an employee in this nonsense it feels like?
Workday’s student offering is designed as a full student management offering like Banner et al, with the carrot that it’s internally integrated into the financial & HR systems, which avoids another vendor and also a massive and ongoing finger pointing exercise.
It’s also one of the few from-scratch cloud-first student management solutions.
Banner is just a pile of hacks on top of an Oracle ERP with 7 character names for everything in the core. At least that was the state of affairs as of a number of years ago.
I work for an R1 university that just launched Workday recently and it has been a total disaster.
Consultants + vendor pitch a nice shiny solution that handles everything & works flawlessly. In actuality it resulted in a net efficiency & productivity loss vs the homegrown systems we came from.
It sure did generate plenty of billables for the consultants though, who mind you, are still contracted over a year later.
It’s horrifying to peak into industries you’re unfamiliar with and see what’s going on. It’s like lifting up the rotting log on your property. You just want to quickly put it back down.
WUSTL has more administrators than students:
> Academic staff 4,551 (2024)
> Administrative staff 17,979 (2024)
> Students 16,399 (fall 2024)
University of Munich, a prestigious university in German, has only 8,200 administrators for 54,000 students. So less than half the administrators for more than triple the number of students.
The University of Munich has a budget of 800 million Euro. Excluding the medical school, WUSTL has a budget over $4 billion.
The medical school accounts for half of all staff but less than 10% of the students - your Munich numbers don't seem to include the affiliated hospital.
Back in the day, wustl.edu was seen as a leader in computer applications. Sad now that it cannot just create its own systems to handle its tasks, especially with AI’s around to offer coding help. Imagine spending a fraction of this money and vectoring it to students to develop said systems.
Is it any worse than an army of consultants? It would be one thing if it was some off the shelf software but a huge chunk of this project seems to be a new custom application intended for student and faculty use.
It just sounds like Accenture-ware with a new name.
If you’re going to open with “is having cs students hack their way to a solution via AI actually worse than Workday?”, this isn’t a fair discussion for who you’re replying to. I assume you’re young and well-intentioned. I would have said the same thing when I was young. The problem is that approach leaves you with, best case with overworked students looking for glory instead of pay, failing classes and enjoy hacking, ~80% of the work done and no staff for maintenance. This isnt an
opportunity for hero hacker story, its a real business, it affect people’s lives at their most vulnerable (higher education, paid education, hospital system)
Spending roughly $38M per year (as per the Register article) for HRM, EPM, IBP, and CRM in an organization with roughly 22,000 employees [0] and 16,000 students [1] is a fair amount.
HNers really underestimate the complexity of software projects in organizations as divided as a large private research university that is also a major healthcare network [2].
I worked for a CRM reseller for a bit when I was younger.
At the time the industry wisdom was that basically 80% of CRM projects fail to return value. And the customers knew that plainly, but the alternative was trying to keep some COBOL era system limping along. So even though they knew they were likely going to burn a huge pile of money, it felt like a necessity.
So a sort of stockholm syndrome mentality takes root where they just hope they can limit the bleeding as much as possible.
Also just HIPAA being in the mix adds non trivial complexities.
> Also just HIPAA being in the mix adds non trivial complexities
Yep, and WUSTL - like most Universities - is a major medical network in it's region. Ime, the bulk of the costs that arose from Higher Ed contracts I dealt with were due to the fact that most Higher Ed institutions were also medical networks.
But the issue is, medical PHI is important, and outages can lead to liability and potentially patient risk.
> At the time the industry wisdom was that basically 80% of CRM projects fail to return value. And the customers knew that plainly, but the alternative was trying to keep some COBOL era system limping along. So even though they knew they were likely going to burn a huge pile of money, it felt like a necessity
Pretty much, because the TCO for a Cobol system limping along would eventually become unsustainable - especially if you had dozens of BUs with their own internal data practices.
Yeah, I had an unexpected insight into all this as growing up, my best friend's dad was a COBOL programmer for Metlife insurance.
The upside of those old mainframe centric systems is they do have impressive reliability. But you increasingly become dependent on just a handful of old souls like my friend's dad that are the only people who understand it in sufficient detail to try to update it.
My friend's dad had good job security but it seemed pretty demoralizing otherwise.
Nope, it's bullshit complexity gas that expands to the container that contains it (whatever budget that they can convince people to spend driven by however large an administration the leadership can get away with to justify their salary).
People drink the KoolAid and here we are. This is just the middle management disease that takes over everything unless people are very careful.
An organization that houses, feeds, provides community medical care, and hundreds of other services like a private university like WUSTL needs a centralized system for procurement, human resource management, integrating different business units, etc would of course be extremely complex.
Just because YOU don't understand the complexities behind managing an organization with 22k employees and 16k dependents doesn't mean it's any less important.
This is the equivalent of a CFO saying spending on data redundancy is an unnecessary cost because it is a waste of opex - to translate to you as a DevOps wonk.
$1000/person is reasonable? You could literally have a secretary/admin spend _multiple days per year per person_ managing things for that much. The software administrative complex is completely mad.
The thing is, they don't need to be more complex. Their administration bloated because it could in order to enrich the people in the administration. It's the MBA/middle management disease.
Why exactly are Universities all-inclusive day cares for young adults covering every life need under a single administrative umbrella? It's like a capitalist commune. Landlord, hospital network, a few professional sports teams, dozens of amateur sports teams, several restaurant chains, life coaches, a police force, and on and on and on.
They do everything, the things they do they overcomplicate, and they overreach control of every tiny thing all under one umbrella. Of course it's absurdly expensive, but there's no reason it needs to be besides there's no incentive for anybody to cut back on anything ever.
So while this may sound like it'll be in the case studies of ERP/CRM etc failed projects, which has some very memorable writeups, the judgement of failure/success is still out (or shd we say jury is out)
I'm just here to pile on the already plenty takes on how Workday is the most dogshit piece of SaaS I've had the misfortune of working with.
- The UI is slow as hell.
- The discoverability of features is non existent. Everything is a "report" and you need to know exactly what keywords to type to discover them.
- Their APIs are even more shit. I had to build a solution around discovering 3rd Party integrations into Workday and I suffered burnout by the end of it.
Workday cannot be a serious business operating the way it does and charging the way it does in 2025.
workday is VERY expensive, probably one of the most, my company (150 employees) can't afford it, we ended up using something else, cheaper, and quite frankly, it does the same stuff.
Whatever you’re using handles international employees (UW has visiting faculty)? It has a student information module to enable course selection, grading records, transcript requests, etc? It supports multi-role entities so you can track workers that are also alums, students that are also workers, and any other weird combination universities run into?
I mean, I’m not saying that $266m isn’t ridiculous and that Workday isn’t very expensive, but to pretend that UW can just use whatever your small company ended up with as a major ERP isn’t realistic. They need to track 35k staff (UW includes a full health system) and 50k students. There’s three total software packages you can take seriously on the market for this, and they all suck in their own way and are all ridiculously expensive and hard to implement.
Edit: wrong university. UWash is much smaller on both staff and students.
They've (so far) spent $7,600 per staff member. They could have employed an actual person to sit besides each group of, say, 10 staff to deal with their ERP needs in person.
I've always thought it would be interesting to be the guy called in to clean up these messes. That's where I'd love my career to go... being called in to turn around a sinking ship.
Technology projects have a habit of going wildly off the rails, especially if you're not at ${bigTechCo} with a really mature software factory pumping out large projects consistently, so it seems like there'd be no shortage of mess to clean up around the industry.
The idea of building something greenfield isn't as interesting as fixing a badly broken machine to me. Call it a fixer complex :)
As a consultant, I do actually quite enjoy proper shitshow engagements - not least because, from a very selfish point of view, it's often possible to make a really obvious positive impact, which is really satisfying.
For a situation as bad as the one described here, though, the scope for an individual engineer - no matter how experienced - to turn things around is going to be limited. The core problem is almost certainly organisational and cultural rather than technical, so it needs to be addressed at the strategic management level.
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?
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
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.
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.
> 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?
It’s engineering, not research
PhD in engineering is a thing
That is still a research position.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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
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.
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+.
> 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.
I am saying that. Salary + taxes + insurance + retirement + other benefits + support cost is around 670k. Salary eats up like 160k of that budget, though.
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.
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
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.
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.
A LOT of major software was written in universities, plenty of the foundational technologies of the Internet included.
#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.
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
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.
There exists a large well-paid army of tech sales ppl whose whole job is to make sure that can never happen.
The real answer is:
the kickbacks are too good.
Workday, Palantir, ServiceNow - a new generation of Accenture/Oracle et al 'consulting' parasites that wine and dine their way into organisations (and governments) and then bleed them dry. There's a reason software spending endlessly goes up but productivity has flatlined.
These companies exist because non-tech companies building in-house software for their complex workflows also tend to run millions over budget and create brittle, bespoke software.
Also, I wouldn’t put Palantir in the same bucket as Workday and ServiceNow. It’s expensive, but it does work.
So now 'professional management' bring in these firms and instead run hundreds of millions over budget to create brittle, bespoke software. It's profoundly damning on our industry that decades of software development later most productivity gains stopped at about the point Excel and email became widespread. Software has eaten the world('s budgets) with little to show for it. No wonder all these parasites are so excited about AI, another whease to flog to naive orgnaisations that will inevitably spiral in cost, deliver nothing of value and suck more budget from anything useful. Then sell them 'cybersecurity' and 'observability' on top because now their security is Swiss cheese.
I empathize with you, but it’s also worth saying that not all firms are the same. Just as not all in-house teams are the same. There are good ones and bad ones. Even inside firms there are good teams and bad teams. Enterprise software is complex and good software engineers are expensive. These projects are delayed and go over budget because their complexities are grossly underestimated.
ServiceNow is so terrible I genuinely wonder how it is ever deployed anywhere. Seriously, do the purchasers never look at it? Is there no product demo at all during the purchase process? Do the sales people actively hide it or something?
I work in a department that has been using ServiceNow for at least 5 years, and I still do not know how to look up a ticket by ticket number. I just pretend I'm following along when my colleagues reference a ticket.
I just spent a minute poking at it: my dashboard page didn't load, then it told me there are no open tickets in the system, then clicking on a different ticket number to open it didn't do anything, and then the server stopped responding. (Edit: it took 48 seconds to load the ticket.)
They also have a little stopwatch button on some pages that pops up a "Browser Response Time" window that tries to put the blame for slow page load times on the user's browser. Weird, wonder why they need that...
Yes! It always amazes me there seems to be no obvious URL scheme for servicenow.sadcompany.com/<ticket-number> Like, did the developers forget to implement that?
Yeah, and there's no search field, either. Surely, this is my misunderstanding and I should click the "Show Help" icon for a product tutorial, right? This pops up a window saying:
> Now Assist offers real-time guidance and support for users seeking help with Virtual Agent. This feature’s generative AI skills blah blah blah
Ok...? There is no input box to interact with "Now Assist" or the "Virtual Agent", it's just like a marketing blurb for some other feature.
F500, we have a pretty custom ServiceNow, but all I do is put the ticket or any other identifier in the search box and go. Takes 2 seconds to be in the ticket. Granted, that interface sucks too, but I suspect your main problem is internal to your org and the people that configured your ServiceNow.
Your system was configured by muppets if you don’t have a search box - it’s a massive beast that like all enterprise-grade software is a toolbox for you to bend to your will, but the downside is that if your configuration people don’t have empathy for the users (and looking at you especially, contract architects) you end up with a system that is optimised for whoever talks with the vendor, and not for anyone else.
What? Unless someone actively removed the search field, you should have quite a big search field in the top right corner, where you can basically search for anything you'd need.
This works https://company.service-now.com/task.do?sysparm_query=number...
> my dashboard page didn't load, then it told me there are no open tickets in the system, then clicking on a different ticket number to open it didn't do anything, and then the server stopped responding.
Like all SaaS in-house implementations, this is entirely on how your company's ServiceNow developers.
I've worked on multiple SNOW implementations and things can go really bad when you go crazy with the customizations.
Your comment makes me understand the product even less. So it’s SaaS where you have to develop it yourself? What exactly is the company providing? Why do its customers simultaneously want to outsource this to a vendor and then spend resources customizing it down to the level of “basic CRUD operations work” and “the user sees a search field”?
ServiceNow is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS), not a SaaS, that allows development of new products on top of it.
At its core, there is a workflow management engine that third parties can use to implement their own, stateful, process centric products and services.
We have ServiceNow proper (the CRM) and a completely unrelated to CRM third party product that we have purchased and which is implemented on the ServiceNow platform. Both have nothing to do with each other and are used by different business users.
You don't develop it, you develop on it. SN provides the underlying software, implementations, hosting, upgrades, etc. Salesforce is another example of this.
Not to say that ServiceNow is great, but not being able to type the number into the search bar (top right) sounds more like a user issue than anything else.
I love that ServiceNow has completely broken the back/forward behavior in its own unique way.
Yes, many other sites also break this navigation, but SN takes it to a whole other level.
Want to open and edit multiple records in different tabs? You're a braver soul than I. Better also double check what record you go back to when you click Update. Which is of course different to when you right click and choose Save.
What comes after UI16 for user interface design? Well, UIB, of course. UI16 still looks straight out of 2016.
We have something called ServiceNow where I work. It's so horrible that I assumed it was in house.
I, too, made this assumption. Then I learned it was an actual product my ex-employer had selected and kept using.
It still didn't make sense why an enhancement request and a fix request couldn't be moved between queues. Or why I received three (at least) emails when an issue was closed.
> ServiceNow is so terrible I genuinely wonder how it is ever deployed anywhere. Seriously, do the purchasers never look at it?
When I first saw ServiceNow, I was impressed - because my point of comparison (I worked for a university at the time) was BMC Remedy, which was terrible. And some years later I did some consulting for a major bank which was using some 3270-based IBM solution (Tivoli something… I believe it has finally been discontinued) and ServiceNow is light years ahead of that too.
How organizations would pay for Workday baffles me. It is the worst company software I've ever used. It would regularly lose data that managers would input so the best practice amongst EMs was to never put data directly into Workday but instead keep copies elsewhere and only input it into Workday at the last moment. Then if Workday decided to drop your performance feedback you could just paste it again.
It must be really really really good for the HR decision makers though?
My guess is that it's the IBM or React of HR. Everyone knows it, everyone knows how to use it.
> It must be really really really good for the HR decision makers though
Data Integration.
Workday is extremely good at integrating various different data sources and providing support to build integrations if they are not offered by them.
A private research university like WUSTL is a conglomeration of around 10 colleges all of which all have their own internal operations, a couple organizations dedicated to facilities maintenance, an entire community medical network dedicated to STL metro, a major sports program, housing for students and faculty, procurement, insurance, etc.
All of these are entire business units or functionally independent organizations. And in this complexity arises multiple different organically developed data stores, schemas, and practices. At that kind of scale, liability grows exponentially and you as an organization need a way to better understand what is happening.
That is why products like Workday are beloved by enterprises.
I'm surprised to see them on a patchwork of applications still and not already on an enterprise-wide system like Ellucian Banner. I wasn't expecting Workday here, though.
That doesn't quite make sense for a college. Students aren't employees, why are we trying to fit them into the same mold as an employee in this nonsense it feels like?
Workday’s student offering is designed as a full student management offering like Banner et al, with the carrot that it’s internally integrated into the financial & HR systems, which avoids another vendor and also a massive and ongoing finger pointing exercise.
It’s also one of the few from-scratch cloud-first student management solutions.
Banner is just a pile of hacks on top of an Oracle ERP with 7 character names for everything in the core. At least that was the state of affairs as of a number of years ago.
Its page load time is as if it's running to the first clouds...
I work for an R1 university that just launched Workday recently and it has been a total disaster.
Consultants + vendor pitch a nice shiny solution that handles everything & works flawlessly. In actuality it resulted in a net efficiency & productivity loss vs the homegrown systems we came from.
It sure did generate plenty of billables for the consultants though, who mind you, are still contracted over a year later.
infinite money glitch!
It’s horrifying to peak into industries you’re unfamiliar with and see what’s going on. It’s like lifting up the rotting log on your property. You just want to quickly put it back down.
WUSTL has more administrators than students:
> Academic staff 4,551 (2024)
> Administrative staff 17,979 (2024)
> Students 16,399 (fall 2024)
University of Munich, a prestigious university in German, has only 8,200 administrators for 54,000 students. So less than half the administrators for more than triple the number of students.
The University of Munich has a budget of 800 million Euro. Excluding the medical school, WUSTL has a budget over $4 billion.
The medical school accounts for half of all staff but less than 10% of the students - your Munich numbers don't seem to include the affiliated hospital.
Back in the day, wustl.edu was seen as a leader in computer applications. Sad now that it cannot just create its own systems to handle its tasks, especially with AI’s around to offer coding help. Imagine spending a fraction of this money and vectoring it to students to develop said systems.
“Just let students vibe code your ERP” is a hell of a take.
What do you think the consultants are doing? They're mostly last year's graduates anyway.
Is it any worse than an army of consultants? It would be one thing if it was some off the shelf software but a huge chunk of this project seems to be a new custom application intended for student and faculty use.
It just sounds like Accenture-ware with a new name.
If you’re going to open with “is having cs students hack their way to a solution via AI actually worse than Workday?”, this isn’t a fair discussion for who you’re replying to. I assume you’re young and well-intentioned. I would have said the same thing when I was young. The problem is that approach leaves you with, best case with overworked students looking for glory instead of pay, failing classes and enjoy hacking, ~80% of the work done and no staff for maintenance. This isnt an opportunity for hero hacker story, its a real business, it affect people’s lives at their most vulnerable (higher education, paid education, hospital system)
Admitting "Our students cant design or code" is also pretty wild.
What you describe is possibly the one thing that would be worse than implementing Workday.
Spending roughly $38M per year (as per the Register article) for HRM, EPM, IBP, and CRM in an organization with roughly 22,000 employees [0] and 16,000 students [1] is a fair amount.
HNers really underestimate the complexity of software projects in organizations as divided as a large private research university that is also a major healthcare network [2].
[0] - https://governmentrelations.wustl.edu/economic-impact-st-lou...
[1] - https://washu.edu/about-washu/university-facts/
[2] - https://physicians.wustl.edu/
I worked for a CRM reseller for a bit when I was younger.
At the time the industry wisdom was that basically 80% of CRM projects fail to return value. And the customers knew that plainly, but the alternative was trying to keep some COBOL era system limping along. So even though they knew they were likely going to burn a huge pile of money, it felt like a necessity.
So a sort of stockholm syndrome mentality takes root where they just hope they can limit the bleeding as much as possible.
Also just HIPAA being in the mix adds non trivial complexities.
> Also just HIPAA being in the mix adds non trivial complexities
Yep, and WUSTL - like most Universities - is a major medical network in it's region. Ime, the bulk of the costs that arose from Higher Ed contracts I dealt with were due to the fact that most Higher Ed institutions were also medical networks.
But the issue is, medical PHI is important, and outages can lead to liability and potentially patient risk.
> At the time the industry wisdom was that basically 80% of CRM projects fail to return value. And the customers knew that plainly, but the alternative was trying to keep some COBOL era system limping along. So even though they knew they were likely going to burn a huge pile of money, it felt like a necessity
Pretty much, because the TCO for a Cobol system limping along would eventually become unsustainable - especially if you had dozens of BUs with their own internal data practices.
Yeah, I had an unexpected insight into all this as growing up, my best friend's dad was a COBOL programmer for Metlife insurance.
The upside of those old mainframe centric systems is they do have impressive reliability. But you increasingly become dependent on just a handful of old souls like my friend's dad that are the only people who understand it in sufficient detail to try to update it.
My friend's dad had good job security but it seemed pretty demoralizing otherwise.
What the hell PHI / EHR work is Workday doing?
The answer should be "none".
Spending $2k/year/student on it sounds pretty insane to me. At that price it would be cheaper just to hire an army of secretaries and do it on paper.
Nope, it's bullshit complexity gas that expands to the container that contains it (whatever budget that they can convince people to spend driven by however large an administration the leadership can get away with to justify their salary).
People drink the KoolAid and here we are. This is just the middle management disease that takes over everything unless people are very careful.
An organization that houses, feeds, provides community medical care, and hundreds of other services like a private university like WUSTL needs a centralized system for procurement, human resource management, integrating different business units, etc would of course be extremely complex.
Just because YOU don't understand the complexities behind managing an organization with 22k employees and 16k dependents doesn't mean it's any less important.
This is the equivalent of a CFO saying spending on data redundancy is an unnecessary cost because it is a waste of opex - to translate to you as a DevOps wonk.
$1000/person is reasonable? You could literally have a secretary/admin spend _multiple days per year per person_ managing things for that much. The software administrative complex is completely mad.
Honestly I think most IT systems are net negative for most orgs. If you remove some db batch jobs like payroll it looks even worse.
Payroll, inventory ... what else? Student grades maybe. Contact info for studemts and employees. Essentially keeping a simple db schema.
As I previously mentioned, universities - especially in the US - are much more complex organizations. They aren't just "school for adults".
The thing is, they don't need to be more complex. Their administration bloated because it could in order to enrich the people in the administration. It's the MBA/middle management disease.
Why exactly are Universities all-inclusive day cares for young adults covering every life need under a single administrative umbrella? It's like a capitalist commune. Landlord, hospital network, a few professional sports teams, dozens of amateur sports teams, several restaurant chains, life coaches, a police force, and on and on and on.
They do everything, the things they do they overcomplicate, and they overreach control of every tiny thing all under one umbrella. Of course it's absurdly expensive, but there's no reason it needs to be besides there's no incentive for anybody to cut back on anything ever.
In context, WUSTL has a $13+ billion endowment and earned solid returns as last reported: https://endowment.wustl.edu/about/endowment/
So while this may sound like it'll be in the case studies of ERP/CRM etc failed projects, which has some very memorable writeups, the judgement of failure/success is still out (or shd we say jury is out)
I'm just here to pile on the already plenty takes on how Workday is the most dogshit piece of SaaS I've had the misfortune of working with.
- The UI is slow as hell.
- The discoverability of features is non existent. Everything is a "report" and you need to know exactly what keywords to type to discover them.
- Their APIs are even more shit. I had to build a solution around discovering 3rd Party integrations into Workday and I suffered burnout by the end of it.
Workday cannot be a serious business operating the way it does and charging the way it does in 2025.
With that amount of money I’d suspect corruption unless explicitly proved otherwise.
Sounds like today's version of "Call Accidenture" - https://youtu.be/9DWLv4tQsz4.
Was wondering how Workday a managed to sponsor so much stuff
workday is VERY expensive, probably one of the most, my company (150 employees) can't afford it, we ended up using something else, cheaper, and quite frankly, it does the same stuff.
You had a lucky escape! Workday may be the worst software I've ever been forced to use.
Can confirm. It's like they actively try to make it terrible.
You might want to share with the class?
Maybe Rippling?
Whatever you’re using handles international employees (UW has visiting faculty)? It has a student information module to enable course selection, grading records, transcript requests, etc? It supports multi-role entities so you can track workers that are also alums, students that are also workers, and any other weird combination universities run into?
I mean, I’m not saying that $266m isn’t ridiculous and that Workday isn’t very expensive, but to pretend that UW can just use whatever your small company ended up with as a major ERP isn’t realistic. They need to track 35k staff (UW includes a full health system) and 50k students. There’s three total software packages you can take seriously on the market for this, and they all suck in their own way and are all ridiculously expensive and hard to implement.
Edit: wrong university. UWash is much smaller on both staff and students.
They've (so far) spent $7,600 per staff member. They could have employed an actual person to sit besides each group of, say, 10 staff to deal with their ERP needs in person.
UW and Washington University are two totally different, unrelated institutions.
I've always thought it would be interesting to be the guy called in to clean up these messes. That's where I'd love my career to go... being called in to turn around a sinking ship.
Technology projects have a habit of going wildly off the rails, especially if you're not at ${bigTechCo} with a really mature software factory pumping out large projects consistently, so it seems like there'd be no shortage of mess to clean up around the industry.
The idea of building something greenfield isn't as interesting as fixing a badly broken machine to me. Call it a fixer complex :)
Nah, it's a horrible job. They box you in so that there is no acceptable solution then blame you for not fixing it.
Bummer McBummertown. That seems less fun.
As a consultant, I do actually quite enjoy proper shitshow engagements - not least because, from a very selfish point of view, it's often possible to make a really obvious positive impact, which is really satisfying.
For a situation as bad as the one described here, though, the scope for an individual engineer - no matter how experienced - to turn things around is going to be limited. The core problem is almost certainly organisational and cultural rather than technical, so it needs to be addressed at the strategic management level.
Agreed - I wouldn’t go in as an IC, I’d go in as leadership.
Imagine spending that kind of money, and even if everything goes perfectly, your still stuck with fucking Workday at the end.
How much do they pay the football coach?
it's in fact $66MM, the $200MM is for the kickbacks.
We call those "change requests"
this is a disgusting amount of money for this
so whats equivalent to a take home interview project due in 7 days takes a university 7 years and $266M
proof we should be getting paid for assessments