What’s the bare minimum cost to run tech at a small college?

What’s the lowest possible cost for enterprise tech at a small college? Let’s say 1,000 undergrads, with and without dorms. You’d need an SIS, Finance, and HR system. A cloud email and collaboration suite. An LMS. A solid network and classroom tech. Plus staff to keep it all running. What’s the least you could spend and still have a functioning setup?

How many buildings, and how spread out? How many floors? How many rooms? What kind of programs are being offered? The cost difference between supporting quantum computing research and running a basic business degree program is pretty huge.

Yeah, there’s a wide range. I’m thinking about a rough model that estimates the lowest cost for a commuter school, a small school with 300 residential students, and a few other scenarios. It feels like some schools are spending below what’s realistically sustainable and are either taking big risks (cybersecurity, disaster recovery, etc.) or piling up technical debt.

And just constantly putting out whatever fire is burning the hottest at the moment.

Educause lists the lowest IT spend per full-time student at $1,961 for 2022-23.

Check out the EDUCAUSE IT Spending and Staffing Almanac for the full range.

That said, costs depend completely on vendors, service levels, and having enough staff to keep everything from falling apart.

I asked ChatGPT for an estimate, and it gave me $1.58 million per year, which actually lines up pretty well with the EDUCAUSE data.

Yeah, I saw those numbers (though CoPilot gave me a much lower estimate, even though it’s using a similar model). Ideally, we’d account for factors like dorms, metro area vs. rural, Carnegie classification, grad/doctoral FTEs, and a few other things.

I’ve also noticed some weird outliers in the Educause CDS data, especially on costs like benefits and outsourced staffing. You can adjust for that by looking at a bigger sample or generalizing.

Yeah, there’s no way to generalize edtech costs. The same vendor will quote two similar schools wildly different prices depending on things like ease of implementation and timing—end-of-fiscal-year deals can be way better.

I also really miss Casey Green’s Campus Computing Project. It was nice having more solid data models.

One million dollars.

Got a breakdown of that? Feels like that might be a bit low.

I like your thinking—let’s bump it up to $2 million. Cash. I’ll make it work, no problem.