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.

$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.

Honestly I think most IT systems are net negative for most orgs. If you remove some db batch jobs like payroll it looks even worse.

Payroll, inventory ... what else? Student grades maybe. Contact info for studemts and employees. Essentially keeping a simple db schema.

As I previously mentioned, universities - especially in the US - are much more complex organizations. They aren't just "school for adults".

The thing is, they don't need to be more complex. Their administration bloated because it could in order to enrich the people in the administration. It's the MBA/middle management disease.

Why exactly are Universities all-inclusive day cares for young adults covering every life need under a single administrative umbrella? It's like a capitalist commune. Landlord, hospital network, a few professional sports teams, dozens of amateur sports teams, several restaurant chains, life coaches, a police force, and on and on and on.

They do everything, the things they do they overcomplicate, and they overreach control of every tiny thing all under one umbrella. Of course it's absurdly expensive, but there's no reason it needs to be besides there's no incentive for anybody to cut back on anything ever.