Comment by gkoberger
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...)
> 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.