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.
> 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.
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
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.
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...
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.
> 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.
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.
One of our local, private, and financially troubled universities has their department hierarchy on line. I was amazed, while recently looking to get in contact with a person about auditing a class, how many "head of XXXX" positions existed in the university directory. It seems way more complicated that it needs to be, and I can see how they would be in financial dire straits.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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?
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
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.
I guess we could also flip it and ask why don't we offer PhDs in developing software for public administration?
I think it might also be something else.
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.
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).
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.
> 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 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.
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+.
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 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.
the kickbacks are too good.
Also, I wouldn’t put Palantir in the same bucket as Workday and ServiceNow. It’s expensive, but it does work.
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, 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.
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.
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.
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?
It’s also one of the few from-scratch cloud-first student management solutions.
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.
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.
It just sounds like Accenture-ware with a new name.
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/
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.
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.
People drink the KoolAid and here we are. This is just the middle management disease that takes over everything unless people are very careful.
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.
- 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.