Higher Education Software sucks mightily for the most part. It's way too rigid and often, the cost of customization is prohibitive for offices working on a cert

Higher Education Software sucks mightily for the most part. It's way too rigid and often, the cost of customization is prohibitive for offices working on a certain budget. Also, for some reason, common sense in decision making is not a factor many a times as far as Higher Ed IT goes. I work in higher ed and often see quotes for doing very simple things to be in hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars. The integration of software from different vendors is a nightmare as no one really provides any sort of an API and such customizations usually end up being ugly hacks since the vendors would charge exorbitantly for doing the same. Also, there's rarely a way to successfully propose a change due to the investment in legacy software and sunken costs. Not to mention the crappy SLAs that the vendors provide. As far as issues like wordcount, it could be something as trivial as changing the parameters on the backend for the system to accept X+Y characters for validation instead of X but still advertise the X character limit on the front end.