Comment by xmprt
They're also paying $5M per year to maintain the servers and software. In theory they don't have to think about it but that just highlights the waste even more. I wish I could spend $5M without thinking.
They're also paying $5M per year to maintain the servers and software. In theory they don't have to think about it but that just highlights the waste even more. I wish I could spend $5M without thinking.
> so in perspective it's a very small amount of money
$5M/year could pay for at least another 10-20 professors which is like an entirely new department. Let's also not forget the initial $600M spent which (assuming they'll use this software for the next 30 years) will be $20M/year bringing the total to $100/student/year which isn't negligible.
More broadly speaking, I have a gripe with people bringing up percentages of budgets when discussing how much value something brings. My college had a startup fair where students pitched some super innovative ideas. The grand prize was $5000. If we had $5M, we could give that grand prize to 1000 teams and imagine how much more valuable that would be for the school compared to another feature bloated, overpriced piece of software.
Programmers. You code the system once, it's not that complex, spend $10M max.
Then you maintain it with a couple of senior devs at $1M/year max.
The one-letter omission of "k" in "$20k/student/year" really makes a difference here.
CUNY's yearly budget is $5.7 billion, and they serve 243,000 students. It makes up 0.088% of their budget.
That $5M/year works out to $20/student/year, so in perspective it's a very small amount of money.
(Source: https://www.budget.ny.gov/pubs/archive/fy24/ex/agencies/appr...)