[justanotherbody]

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

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

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

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

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

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

[hshdhdhj4444]

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

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

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