Comment by xmprt
> 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.
Okay, so if you hire 10-20 more professors... who's going to build and maintain the system so students can sign up for those classes?