6 ms·

Workday project at Washington University hits $266M

89 points by sebastian_z 10mo ago

natas 10mo ago
workday is VERY expensive, probably one of the most, my company (150 employees) can't afford it, we ended up using something else, cheaper, and quite frankly, it does the same stuff.
- rwmj 10mo ago
  You had a lucky escape! Workday may be the worst software I've ever been forced to use.
  - johnboiles 10mo ago
    Can confirm. It's like they actively try to make it terrible.
- bc569a80a344f9c 10mo ago
  Whatever you’re using handles international employees (UW has visiting faculty)? It has a student information module to enable course selection, grading records, transcript requests, etc? It supports multi-role entities so you can track workers that are also alums, students that are also workers, and any other weird combination universities run into? I mean, I’m not saying that $266m isn’t ridiculous and that Workday isn’t very expensive, but to pretend that UW can just use whatever your small company ended up with as a major ERP isn’t realistic. They need to track 35k staff (UW includes a full health system) and 50k students. There’s three total software packages you can take seriously on the market for this, and they all suck in their own way and are all ridiculously expensive and hard to implement. Edit: wrong university. UWash is much smaller on both staff and students.
  - rwmj 10mo ago
    They've (so far) spent $7,600 per staff member. They could have employed an actual person to sit besides each group of, say, 10 staff to deal with their ERP needs in person.
  - bobthepanda 10mo ago
    UW and Washington University are two totally different, unrelated institutions.
- qmr 10mo ago
  You might want to share with the class?
  - seattle_spring 10mo ago
    Maybe Rippling?
yieldcrv 10mo ago
so whats equivalent to a take home interview project due in 7 days takes a university 7 years and $266M proof we should be getting paid for assessments
msy 10mo ago
Workday, Palantir, ServiceNow - a new generation of Accenture/Oracle et al 'consulting' parasites that wine and dine their way into organisations (and governments) and then bleed them dry. There's a reason software spending endlessly goes up but productivity has flatlined.
- rwmj 10mo ago
  ServiceNow is so terrible I genuinely wonder how it is ever deployed anywhere. Seriously, do the purchasers never look at it? Is there no product demo at all during the purchase process? Do the sales people actively hide it or something?
  - skissane 10mo ago
    > ServiceNow is so terrible I genuinely wonder how it is ever deployed anywhere. Seriously, do the purchasers never look at it? When I first saw ServiceNow, I was impressed - because my point of comparison (I worked for a university at the time) was BMC Remedy, which was terrible. And some years later I did some consulting for a major bank which was using some 3270-based IBM solution (Tivoli something… I believe it has finally been discontinued) and ServiceNow is light years ahead of that too.
  - rgovostes 10mo ago
    I work in a department that has been using ServiceNow for at least 5 years, and I still do not know how to look up a ticket by ticket number. I just pretend I'm following along when my colleagues reference a ticket. I just spent a minute poking at it: my dashboard page didn't load, then it told me there are no open tickets in the system, then clicking on a different ticket number to open it didn't do anything, and then the server stopped responding. (Edit: it took 48 seconds to load the ticket.) They also have a little stopwatch button on some pages that pops up a "Browser Response Time" window that tries to put the blame for slow page load times on the user's browser. Weird, wonder why they need that...
    - rwmj 10mo ago
      Yes! It always amazes me there seems to be no obvious URL scheme for servicenow.sadcompany.com/<ticket-number> Like, did the developers forget to implement that?
natas 10mo ago
it's in fact $66MM, the $200MM is for the kickbacks.
- drjasonharrison 10mo ago
  We call those "change requests"
Telemakhos 10mo ago
I guess I have three questions here. 1) What happened to the days when universities published their own software, like pine from UW? It seems like Washington of St Louis, which offers a PhD in computer science, should have some students capable of writing a database to run the university. 2) Why have universities not collaborated to develop a modular, expandable system for running a university, instead of putting themselves at the mercy of Workforce, SAS, etc? 3) These same processes were at some point in the past handled on paper, for far less than $16k/student. At what point did the university so lose its organizational competence that the filing system (that's what a database is) ate the budget?
- natas 10mo ago
  1) Because Leadership knows they don't have the competency to manage a project of this size, universities have become expensive adult daycares. 2) See (1) and also because AI can't do it, so they can't handle. 3) Because paper kills trees, and brawndo contains electrolytes, duh.
  - wongarsu 10mo ago
    To quote the university's website: > Washington University's Executive MBA (EMBA) program provides a holistic approach to managing people, projects, and budgets. It is designed to meet the needs of middle- and senior-level professionals who seek to exercise true organizational leadership in dynamic and changing business environments Sounds like the perfect people to manage your software projects. Not sure if you'd get a professor, hire phds or make it a student-run program, but surely something can be arranged. Maybe they can even rope in the people from the Information Systems Management courses
- Spivak 10mo ago
  Your first point sounds insane on first blush but after using university software for scheduling it is genuinely pretty difficult to imagine how some cs grads / postdocs turned university employees could do any worse. I mean students on their own go rogue and make tools for their peers to make it less painful to much fist shaking by the administration.
russfink 10mo ago
Back in the day, wustl.edu was seen as a leader in computer applications. Sad now that it cannot just create its own systems to handle its tasks, especially with AI’s around to offer coding help. Imagine spending a fraction of this money and vectoring it to students to develop said systems.
- bc569a80a344f9c 10mo ago
  “Just let students vibe code your ERP” is a hell of a take.
  - Spivak 10mo ago
    Is it any worse than an army of consultants? It would be one thing if it was some off the shelf software but a huge chunk of this project seems to be a new custom application intended for student and faculty use. It just sounds like Accenture-ware with a new name.
    - refulgentis 10mo ago
      If you’re going to open with “is having cs students hack their way to a solution via AI actually worse than Workday?”, this isn’t a fair discussion for who you’re replying to. I assume you’re young and well-intentioned. I would have said the same thing when I was young. The problem is that approach leaves you with, best case with overworked students looking for glory instead of pay, failing classes and enjoy hacking, ~80% of the work done and no staff for maintenance. This isnt an opportunity for hero hacker story, its a real business, it affect people’s lives at their most vulnerable (higher education, paid education, hospital system)
  - msy 10mo ago
    What do you think the consultants are doing? They're mostly last year's graduates anyway.
  - rasz 10mo ago
    Admitting "Our students cant design or code" is also pretty wild.
alephnerd 10mo ago
Spending roughly $38M per year (as per the Register article) for HRM, EPM, IBP, and CRM in an organization with roughly 22,000 employees [0] and 16,000 students [1] is a fair amount. HNers really underestimate the complexity of software projects in organizations as divided as a large private research university that is also a major healthcare network [2]. [0] - https://governmentrelations.wustl.edu/economic-impact-st-louis/ https://governmentrelations.wustl.edu/economic-impact-st-lou... [1] - https://washu.edu/about-washu/university-facts/ https://washu.edu/about-washu/university-facts/ [2] - https://physicians.wustl.edu/ https://physicians.wustl.edu/
- colechristensen 10mo ago
  Nope, it's bullshit complexity gas that expands to the container that contains it (whatever budget that they can convince people to spend driven by however large an administration the leadership can get away with to justify their salary). People drink the KoolAid and here we are. This is just the middle management disease that takes over everything unless people are very careful.
  - alephnerd 10mo ago
    An organization that houses, feeds, provides community medical care, and hundreds of other services like a private university like WUSTL needs a centralized system for procurement, human resource management, integrating different business units, etc would of course be extremely complex. Just because YOU don't understand the complexities behind managing an organization with 22k employees and 16k dependents doesn't mean it's any less important. This is the equivalent of a CFO saying spending on data redundancy is an unnecessary cost because it is a waste of opex - to translate to you as a DevOps wonk.
    - msy 10mo ago
      $1000/person is reasonable? You could literally have a secretary/admin spend _multiple days per year per person_ managing things for that much. The software administrative complex is completely mad.
johnboiles 10mo ago
How organizations would pay for Workday baffles me. It is the worst company software I've ever used. It would regularly lose data that managers would input so the best practice amongst EMs was to never put data directly into Workday but instead keep copies elsewhere and only input it into Workday at the last moment. Then if Workday decided to drop your performance feedback you could just paste it again. It must be really really really good for the HR decision makers though?
- alephnerd 10mo ago
  > It must be really really really good for the HR decision makers though Data Integration. Workday is extremely good at integrating various different data sources and providing support to build integrations if they are not offered by them. A private research university like WUSTL is a conglomeration of around 10 colleges all of which all have their own internal operations, a couple organizations dedicated to facilities maintenance, an entire community medical network dedicated to STL metro, a major sports program, housing for students and faculty, procurement, insurance, etc. All of these are entire business units or functionally independent organizations. And in this complexity arises multiple different organically developed data stores, schemas, and practices. At that kind of scale, liability grows exponentially and you as an organization need a way to better understand what is happening. That is why products like Workday are beloved by enterprises.
- Etheryte 10mo ago
  My guess is that it's the IBM or React of HR. Everyone knows it, everyone knows how to use it.
- kotaKat 10mo ago
  I'm surprised to see them on a patchwork of applications still and not already on an enterprise-wide system like Ellucian Banner. I wasn't expecting Workday here, though. That doesn't quite make sense for a college. Students aren't employees, why are we trying to fit them into the same mold as an employee in this nonsense it feels like?
  - 10mo ago
arionmiles 10mo ago
I'm just here to pile on the already plenty takes on how Workday is the most dogshit piece of SaaS I've had the misfortune of working with. - The UI is slow as hell. - The discoverability of features is non existent. Everything is a "report" and you need to know exactly what keywords to type to discover them. - Their APIs are even more shit. I had to build a solution around discovering 3rd Party integrations into Workday and I suffered burnout by the end of it. Workday cannot be a serious business operating the way it does and charging the way it does in 2025.
leecoursey 10mo ago
Sounds like today's version of "Call Accidenture" - https://youtu.be/9DWLv4tQsz4 https://youtu.be/9DWLv4tQsz4.
captainregex 10mo ago
this is a disgusting amount of money for this
jonplackett 10mo ago
Was wondering how Workday a managed to sponsor so much stuff
Esophagus4 10mo ago
I've always thought it would be interesting to be the guy called in to clean up these messes. That's where I'd love my career to go... being called in to turn around a sinking ship. Technology projects have a habit of going wildly off the rails, especially if you're not at ${bigTechCo} with a really mature software factory pumping out large projects consistently, so it seems like there'd be no shortage of mess to clean up around the industry. The idea of building something greenfield isn't as interesting as fixing a badly broken machine to me. Call it a fixer complex :)
- wmf 10mo ago
  Nah, it's a horrible job. They box you in so that there is no acceptable solution then blame you for not fixing it.
  - Esophagus4 10mo ago
    Bummer McBummertown. That seems less fun.
- roryirvine 10mo ago
  As a consultant, I do actually quite enjoy proper shitshow engagements - not least because, from a very selfish point of view, it's often possible to make a really obvious positive impact, which is really satisfying. For a situation as bad as the one described here, though, the scope for an individual engineer - no matter how experienced - to turn things around is going to be limited. The core problem is almost certainly organisational and cultural rather than technical, so it needs to be addressed at the strategic management level.
  - Esophagus4 10mo ago
    Agreed - I wouldn’t go in as an IC, I’d go in as leadership.
markus_zhang 10mo ago
With that amount of money I’d suspect corruption unless explicitly proved otherwise.
zephyreon 10mo ago
I work for an R1 university that just launched Workday recently and it has been a total disaster. Consultants + vendor pitch a nice shiny solution that handles everything & works flawlessly. In actuality it resulted in a net efficiency & productivity loss vs the homegrown systems we came from. It sure did generate plenty of billables for the consultants though, who mind you, are still contracted over a year later.
- natas 10mo ago
  infinite money glitch!
scuff3d 10mo ago
Imagine spending that kind of money, and even if everything goes perfectly, your still stuck with fucking Workday at the end.
- downrightmike 10mo ago
  How much do they pay the football coach?
gtani 10mo ago
In context, WUSTL has a $13+ billion endowment and earned solid returns as last reported: https://endowment.wustl.edu/about/endowment/ https://endowment.wustl.edu/about/endowment/ So while this may sound like it'll be in the case studies of ERP/CRM etc failed projects, which has some very memorable writeups, the judgement of failure/success is still out (or shd we say jury is out)
rayiner 10mo ago
It’s horrifying to peak into industries you’re unfamiliar with and see what’s going on. It’s like lifting up the rotting log on your property. You just want to quickly put it back down. WUSTL has more administrators than students: > Academic staff 4,551 (2024) > Administrative staff 17,979 (2024) > Students 16,399 (fall 2024) University of Munich, a prestigious university in German, has only 8,200 administrators for 54,000 students. So less than half the administrators for more than triple the number of students. The University of Munich has a budget of 800 million Euro. Excluding the medical school, WUSTL has a budget over $4 billion.
- itsdrewmiller 10mo ago
  The medical school accounts for half of all staff but less than 10% of the students - your Munich numbers don't seem to include the affiliated hospital.
- zippyman55 10mo ago
  One of our local, private, and financially troubled universities has their department hierarchy on line. I was amazed, while recently looking to get in contact with a person about auditing a class, how many "head of XXXX" positions existed in the university directory. It seems way more complicated that it needs to be, and I can see how they would be in financial dire straits.

89 points by sebastian_z 10mo ago

natas 10mo ago

workday is VERY expensive, probably one of the most, my company (150 employees) can't afford it, we ended up using something else, cheaper, and quite frankly, it does the same stuff.

rwmj 10mo ago
You had a lucky escape! Workday may be the worst software I've ever been forced to use.
- johnboiles 10mo ago
  Can confirm. It's like they actively try to make it terrible.
bc569a80a344f9c 10mo ago
Whatever you’re using handles international employees (UW has visiting faculty)? It has a student information module to enable course selection, grading records, transcript requests, etc? It supports multi-role entities so you can track workers that are also alums, students that are also workers, and any other weird combination universities run into? I mean, I’m not saying that $266m isn’t ridiculous and that Workday isn’t very expensive, but to pretend that UW can just use whatever your small company ended up with as a major ERP isn’t realistic. They need to track 35k staff (UW includes a full health system) and 50k students. There’s three total software packages you can take seriously on the market for this, and they all suck in their own way and are all ridiculously expensive and hard to implement. Edit: wrong university. UWash is much smaller on both staff and students.
- rwmj 10mo ago
  They've (so far) spent $7,600 per staff member. They could have employed an actual person to sit besides each group of, say, 10 staff to deal with their ERP needs in person.
- bobthepanda 10mo ago
  UW and Washington University are two totally different, unrelated institutions.
qmr 10mo ago
You might want to share with the class?
- seattle_spring 10mo ago
  Maybe Rippling?

yieldcrv 10mo ago

so whats equivalent to a take home interview project due in 7 days takes a university 7 years and $266M proof we should be getting paid for assessments

msy 10mo ago

Workday, Palantir, ServiceNow - a new generation of Accenture/Oracle et al 'consulting' parasites that wine and dine their way into organisations (and governments) and then bleed them dry. There's a reason software spending endlessly goes up but productivity has flatlined.

rwmj 10mo ago
ServiceNow is so terrible I genuinely wonder how it is ever deployed anywhere. Seriously, do the purchasers never look at it? Is there no product demo at all during the purchase process? Do the sales people actively hide it or something?
- skissane 10mo ago
  > ServiceNow is so terrible I genuinely wonder how it is ever deployed anywhere. Seriously, do the purchasers never look at it? When I first saw ServiceNow, I was impressed - because my point of comparison (I worked for a university at the time) was BMC Remedy, which was terrible. And some years later I did some consulting for a major bank which was using some 3270-based IBM solution (Tivoli something… I believe it has finally been discontinued) and ServiceNow is light years ahead of that too.
- rgovostes 10mo ago
  I work in a department that has been using ServiceNow for at least 5 years, and I still do not know how to look up a ticket by ticket number. I just pretend I'm following along when my colleagues reference a ticket. I just spent a minute poking at it: my dashboard page didn't load, then it told me there are no open tickets in the system, then clicking on a different ticket number to open it didn't do anything, and then the server stopped responding. (Edit: it took 48 seconds to load the ticket.) They also have a little stopwatch button on some pages that pops up a "Browser Response Time" window that tries to put the blame for slow page load times on the user's browser. Weird, wonder why they need that...
  - rwmj 10mo ago
    Yes! It always amazes me there seems to be no obvious URL scheme for servicenow.sadcompany.com/<ticket-number> Like, did the developers forget to implement that?

natas 10mo ago

it's in fact $66MM, the $200MM is for the kickbacks.

drjasonharrison 10mo ago
We call those "change requests"

Telemakhos 10mo ago

I guess I have three questions here. 1) What happened to the days when universities published their own software, like pine from UW? It seems like Washington of St Louis, which offers a PhD in computer science, should have some students capable of writing a database to run the university. 2) Why have universities not collaborated to develop a modular, expandable system for running a university, instead of putting themselves at the mercy of Workforce, SAS, etc? 3) These same processes were at some point in the past handled on paper, for far less than $16k/student. At what point did the university so lose its organizational competence that the filing system (that's what a database is) ate the budget?

natas 10mo ago
1) Because Leadership knows they don't have the competency to manage a project of this size, universities have become expensive adult daycares. 2) See (1) and also because AI can't do it, so they can't handle. 3) Because paper kills trees, and brawndo contains electrolytes, duh.
- wongarsu 10mo ago
  To quote the university's website: > Washington University's Executive MBA (EMBA) program provides a holistic approach to managing people, projects, and budgets. It is designed to meet the needs of middle- and senior-level professionals who seek to exercise true organizational leadership in dynamic and changing business environments Sounds like the perfect people to manage your software projects. Not sure if you'd get a professor, hire phds or make it a student-run program, but surely something can be arranged. Maybe they can even rope in the people from the Information Systems Management courses
Spivak 10mo ago
Your first point sounds insane on first blush but after using university software for scheduling it is genuinely pretty difficult to imagine how some cs grads / postdocs turned university employees could do any worse. I mean students on their own go rogue and make tools for their peers to make it less painful to much fist shaking by the administration.

russfink 10mo ago

Back in the day, wustl.edu was seen as a leader in computer applications. Sad now that it cannot just create its own systems to handle its tasks, especially with AI’s around to offer coding help. Imagine spending a fraction of this money and vectoring it to students to develop said systems.

bc569a80a344f9c 10mo ago
“Just let students vibe code your ERP” is a hell of a take.
- Spivak 10mo ago
  Is it any worse than an army of consultants? It would be one thing if it was some off the shelf software but a huge chunk of this project seems to be a new custom application intended for student and faculty use. It just sounds like Accenture-ware with a new name.
  - refulgentis 10mo ago
    If you’re going to open with “is having cs students hack their way to a solution via AI actually worse than Workday?”, this isn’t a fair discussion for who you’re replying to. I assume you’re young and well-intentioned. I would have said the same thing when I was young. The problem is that approach leaves you with, best case with overworked students looking for glory instead of pay, failing classes and enjoy hacking, ~80% of the work done and no staff for maintenance. This isnt an opportunity for hero hacker story, its a real business, it affect people’s lives at their most vulnerable (higher education, paid education, hospital system)
- msy 10mo ago
  What do you think the consultants are doing? They're mostly last year's graduates anyway.
- rasz 10mo ago
  Admitting "Our students cant design or code" is also pretty wild.

alephnerd 10mo ago

Spending roughly $38M per year (as per the Register article) for HRM, EPM, IBP, and CRM in an organization with roughly 22,000 employees [0] and 16,000 students [1] is a fair amount. HNers really underestimate the complexity of software projects in organizations as divided as a large private research university that is also a major healthcare network [2]. [0] - https://governmentrelations.wustl.edu/economic-impact-st-louis/ https://governmentrelations.wustl.edu/economic-impact-st-lou... [1] - https://washu.edu/about-washu/university-facts/ https://washu.edu/about-washu/university-facts/ [2] - https://physicians.wustl.edu/ https://physicians.wustl.edu/

colechristensen 10mo ago
Nope, it's bullshit complexity gas that expands to the container that contains it (whatever budget that they can convince people to spend driven by however large an administration the leadership can get away with to justify their salary). People drink the KoolAid and here we are. This is just the middle management disease that takes over everything unless people are very careful.
- alephnerd 10mo ago
  An organization that houses, feeds, provides community medical care, and hundreds of other services like a private university like WUSTL needs a centralized system for procurement, human resource management, integrating different business units, etc would of course be extremely complex. Just because YOU don't understand the complexities behind managing an organization with 22k employees and 16k dependents doesn't mean it's any less important. This is the equivalent of a CFO saying spending on data redundancy is an unnecessary cost because it is a waste of opex - to translate to you as a DevOps wonk.
  - msy 10mo ago
    $1000/person is reasonable? You could literally have a secretary/admin spend _multiple days per year per person_ managing things for that much. The software administrative complex is completely mad.

johnboiles 10mo ago

How organizations would pay for Workday baffles me. It is the worst company software I've ever used. It would regularly lose data that managers would input so the best practice amongst EMs was to never put data directly into Workday but instead keep copies elsewhere and only input it into Workday at the last moment. Then if Workday decided to drop your performance feedback you could just paste it again. It must be really really really good for the HR decision makers though?

alephnerd 10mo ago
> It must be really really really good for the HR decision makers though Data Integration. Workday is extremely good at integrating various different data sources and providing support to build integrations if they are not offered by them. A private research university like WUSTL is a conglomeration of around 10 colleges all of which all have their own internal operations, a couple organizations dedicated to facilities maintenance, an entire community medical network dedicated to STL metro, a major sports program, housing for students and faculty, procurement, insurance, etc. All of these are entire business units or functionally independent organizations. And in this complexity arises multiple different organically developed data stores, schemas, and practices. At that kind of scale, liability grows exponentially and you as an organization need a way to better understand what is happening. That is why products like Workday are beloved by enterprises.
Etheryte 10mo ago
My guess is that it's the IBM or React of HR. Everyone knows it, everyone knows how to use it.
kotaKat 10mo ago
I'm surprised to see them on a patchwork of applications still and not already on an enterprise-wide system like Ellucian Banner. I wasn't expecting Workday here, though. That doesn't quite make sense for a college. Students aren't employees, why are we trying to fit them into the same mold as an employee in this nonsense it feels like?
- 10mo ago

arionmiles 10mo ago

I'm just here to pile on the already plenty takes on how Workday is the most dogshit piece of SaaS I've had the misfortune of working with. - The UI is slow as hell. - The discoverability of features is non existent. Everything is a "report" and you need to know exactly what keywords to type to discover them. - Their APIs are even more shit. I had to build a solution around discovering 3rd Party integrations into Workday and I suffered burnout by the end of it. Workday cannot be a serious business operating the way it does and charging the way it does in 2025.

leecoursey 10mo ago

Sounds like today's version of "Call Accidenture" - https://youtu.be/9DWLv4tQsz4 https://youtu.be/9DWLv4tQsz4.

captainregex 10mo ago

this is a disgusting amount of money for this

jonplackett 10mo ago

Was wondering how Workday a managed to sponsor so much stuff

Esophagus4 10mo ago

I've always thought it would be interesting to be the guy called in to clean up these messes. That's where I'd love my career to go... being called in to turn around a sinking ship. Technology projects have a habit of going wildly off the rails, especially if you're not at ${bigTechCo} with a really mature software factory pumping out large projects consistently, so it seems like there'd be no shortage of mess to clean up around the industry. The idea of building something greenfield isn't as interesting as fixing a badly broken machine to me. Call it a fixer complex :)

wmf 10mo ago
Nah, it's a horrible job. They box you in so that there is no acceptable solution then blame you for not fixing it.
- Esophagus4 10mo ago
  Bummer McBummertown. That seems less fun.
roryirvine 10mo ago
As a consultant, I do actually quite enjoy proper shitshow engagements - not least because, from a very selfish point of view, it's often possible to make a really obvious positive impact, which is really satisfying. For a situation as bad as the one described here, though, the scope for an individual engineer - no matter how experienced - to turn things around is going to be limited. The core problem is almost certainly organisational and cultural rather than technical, so it needs to be addressed at the strategic management level.
- Esophagus4 10mo ago
  Agreed - I wouldn’t go in as an IC, I’d go in as leadership.

markus_zhang 10mo ago

With that amount of money I’d suspect corruption unless explicitly proved otherwise.

zephyreon 10mo ago

I work for an R1 university that just launched Workday recently and it has been a total disaster. Consultants + vendor pitch a nice shiny solution that handles everything & works flawlessly. In actuality it resulted in a net efficiency & productivity loss vs the homegrown systems we came from. It sure did generate plenty of billables for the consultants though, who mind you, are still contracted over a year later.

natas 10mo ago
infinite money glitch!

scuff3d 10mo ago

Imagine spending that kind of money, and even if everything goes perfectly, your still stuck with fucking Workday at the end.

downrightmike 10mo ago
How much do they pay the football coach?

gtani 10mo ago

In context, WUSTL has a $13+ billion endowment and earned solid returns as last reported: https://endowment.wustl.edu/about/endowment/ https://endowment.wustl.edu/about/endowment/ So while this may sound like it'll be in the case studies of ERP/CRM etc failed projects, which has some very memorable writeups, the judgement of failure/success is still out (or shd we say jury is out)

rayiner 10mo ago

It’s horrifying to peak into industries you’re unfamiliar with and see what’s going on. It’s like lifting up the rotting log on your property. You just want to quickly put it back down. WUSTL has more administrators than students: > Academic staff 4,551 (2024) > Administrative staff 17,979 (2024) > Students 16,399 (fall 2024) University of Munich, a prestigious university in German, has only 8,200 administrators for 54,000 students. So less than half the administrators for more than triple the number of students. The University of Munich has a budget of 800 million Euro. Excluding the medical school, WUSTL has a budget over $4 billion.

itsdrewmiller 10mo ago
The medical school accounts for half of all staff but less than 10% of the students - your Munich numbers don't seem to include the affiliated hospital.
zippyman55 10mo ago
One of our local, private, and financially troubled universities has their department hierarchy on line. I was amazed, while recently looking to get in contact with a person about auditing a class, how many "head of XXXX" positions existed in the university directory. It seems way more complicated that it needs to be, and I can see how they would be in financial dire straits.