Before moving into administration, I had no idea how much of administration is about choosing among, and working with, vendors. They’re probably half of my emails, and nearly all of the calls on my office phone.
I attribute the ubiquity of vendors to a couple of causes, though I’m probably missing a few. The first is the increased complexity of what we have to do. Back when students registered for classes by filling out index cards and dropping them off in person, it was probably reasonable to handle registration with a few detail-oriented employees. Now that students want to be able to register online, at any time, from any location, colleges have to be able to manage technology that requires skills far more expansive and expensive than they’ll have on staff. Similar dynamics occur across the institution, whether in recruitment, HR, assessment, grant tracking, online course support, or the scariest and most complex of all, financial aid.
Tasks that were once much more straightforward have grown more complex, and expectations for turnaround time are much more exacting. I’m old enough to remember when people applied for academic jobs by printing out cover letters and CVs and mailing them. Now applicant tracking requires software packages, and that brings vendors.
Relatedly, of course, vendors hawk “solutions” that promise greater efficiency. That translates into reduced cost of operations.& The usual pitch is that automating this process or that one will “free up” employees to work on other things.
To be fair, sometimes that happens. Years of public disinvestment have forced thin staffing, so efficiency gains are valuable ways to cope. But it isn’t always smooth.
For instance, saying one system is “compatible” with another is sort of like saying one person is compatible with another. Even in the most optimistic scenario, communication between systems is a bit of a crapshoot. The usual “tell” of an issue is when you start hearing the phrase “we’ll have to do that manually.” Systems are built for common use cases, and usually by people who don’t actually use the systems. Uncommon use cases come up, inevitably, and the workarounds begin.
The workarounds work tolerably well until there’s personnel turnover or a new batch of software updates. It feels sometimes like moving a low block on a Jenga tower.
And then there are catastrophic failures, like the hack of Canvas last week. My college uses a competitor to Canvas, so we were spared that nightmare, but having an entire LMS go down the week before final exams is harrowing. It’s also beyond the control of any given college. We can do what we can about local systems, but in a SaaS (software as a service) environment, if the central service is hacked, there’s not much we can do.
(I was disappointed at the relative paucity of news coverage of the Canvas attack. It affected hundreds of thousands of students across the country at a key point of the semester, but outside of trade publications, it barely drew notice. The same could be said of the effects of the Iran war on fertilizer availability; in a few months, it could lead to conspicuous disaster, but it’s almost under the radar now. I have to wonder why.)
When a single vendor serves hundreds or thousands of colleges, a central attack can do damage around the country—that wasn’t possible in the days of index cards.
Every few years, I renew this pitch, and it has been a minute, so I’ll dust it off. If a major philanthropy wants to make a real difference in higher education—MacKenzie Scott leaps to mind, but it’s really a jump ball—underwrite the collaborative development of nonprofit software systems. ERPs, LMSs, CRMs—all of it. Develop systems that reflect reality on the ground, and share them cheaply enough that we’d have actual efficiency gains. Donating to one school benefits one school; developing these systems would benefit schools across the country. Between lower licensing costs and greater fit to tasks, schools around the country would free up operating funds, which are the most important kind of money.
Just be sure to build in adequate security. Nobody wants to see this kind of hack again.
I know we can’t go back to index cards. But we can do better than this.
