Where the IT dollar goes

The bill per student keeps rising

Central IT covers the campus network, the help desk, the enterprise systems, and the people who keep them running. EDUCAUSE, the higher education technology association, benchmarks central IT spending per student FTE, or full-time equivalent, a measure that converts part-time enrollments into fractions of a full-time student so campuses of different sizes can be compared.

Among reporting U.S. institutions, the median central IT spend per student FTE was $1,198 in fiscal 2015-16, $1,316 in 2020-21, $1,500 in 2021-22, and $1,601 in 2022-23. The median institution's total central IT budget rose from $7.7 million in fiscal 2020-21 to $10.6 million in 2022-23; the middle half in the latest cycle spent between $4.8 million and $25.3 million.

The central budget also understates the whole bill. In the 2016 benchmarking cycle, 29 percent of institutions centralized less than three quarters of their IT spending. At those institutions, technology bought by individual schools and departments made up 37 percent of total institutional IT spending, another $581 per institutional full-time equivalent (a denominator that includes faculty and staff).

Eighty cents of every dollar runs what already exists

EDUCAUSE sorts central IT spending into three buckets it calls run, grow, and transform. Run money keeps existing services operating. Grow money adds capacity to those services. Transform money changes how the institution itself works. The benchmark's published split, for fiscal 2015-16 across 680 U.S. institutions, put 80 percent of central IT spending in run, 10 percent in grow, and 5 percent in transform.

That split reflects what the budget asks of the people executing it. Payroll has to clear. Registration has to stay up in the first week of term. Information systems and applications took 18 percent of central IT spending and enterprise infrastructure took another 16 percent, and a campus IT staff keeping a twenty-year-old finance system reconciled and available is doing exactly what the funding asks of it. What the funding leaves for changing how the institution works is 5 cents on the dollar.

The field has named the same obstacle since 2012

In 2012, EDUCAUSE's research center surveyed 231 member institutions and 125 institutional research professionals about analytics. It found 62 percent already using data warehouses, single databases that copy records out of many operating systems so they can be reported together, alongside business intelligence tools, the reporting and dashboard software built on top of them. Its first key finding was that "data use at most institutions is still limited to reporting."

Seven years later, a joint statement from three national higher education associations reported that 39 percent of institutional research offices said they had sufficient capacity to meet stakeholder needs, and 37 percent reported adequate institutional capacity for data-informed decision-making.

In June 2025, an EDUCAUSE QuickPoll asked 165 community respondents where data modernization stands. It was an informal three-day poll, and its questions were co-developed with Amazon Web Services, a company that sells data-modernization services. Siloed data across departments was the most-cited obstacle, at 51 percent, ahead of budget and funding at 49 percent; the poll's categories of "culture and change resistance" and "staff skill gaps" followed at 41 percent each. Twenty-four percent of respondents had begun discussions and implemented nothing, and 68 percent described themselves as mid-journey. A companion piece takes up the economics of joining student records into a single per-student number.

EDUCAUSE first measured the field's analytics maturity in 2012. Of the institutions polled thirteen years later, 1 percent consider their data management and strategy fully modernized.

Nobody publishes a count of the systems an institution runs

No EDUCAUSE benchmark, federal data collection, or peer-reviewed study publishes an average count of administrative systems per college or university. ListEdTech, a market research firm whose implementation database covered 4,684 higher education institutions from 2015 to 2021, prices a typical institution's software estate across 49 product categories, averaging $1,670,687 a year in maintenance spend.

The same data shows how old the systems are. Financial systems stay in place almost 22 years, and human resources systems last more than 20. The student information system, the registrar's core database, stays almost 16 years, and document management about 15. Newer categories such as payment and retention tools turn over in under 10 years.

A data analyst assembling one student's complete record works across that estate. Enrollment status lives in the student information system. The degree audit, the tool that checks completed credits against degree requirements, runs as its own product, and 88 percent of institutions in the 2016 Core Data Service benchmark had one deployed. Advising notes sit in an advising center management system, deployed at 61 percent of institutions. Transfer credit sits in a separate articulation system, also at 61 percent. Charges and payments live in a finance system that has typically been in place for two decades. Respondents to the June 2025 poll described a further layer no inventory reaches: "large amounts of 'shadow' data services and work that are not centrally known."

The systems also get replaced often. In the 2016 benchmark, the systems institutions most expected to replace within three years were the IT service desk and the CRM, the customer relationship management software that tracks prospects and students, at 24 percent each, followed by business intelligence reporting at 19 percent and human resources at 19 percent.

One state audit shows what the gap costs in practice

Washington State moved its 34 community and technical colleges onto one shared administrative system, a project called ctcLink, replacing aging local systems with a single enterprise resource planning platform, the software backbone that carries finance, payroll, and student records. The project was originally estimated at roughly $100 million. It reached $145 million.

In November 2019 the Washington State Auditor's Office released findings on the two pilot districts, as reported by The Spokesman-Review. The colleges could not demonstrate that data from the old systems had converted correctly. Financial aid and payroll functions failed. Account balances differed from the prior systems by more than $18 million at the Spokane district and by more than $1.6 million at Tacoma. Colleges fell back to manually uploading up to 2,200 transactions per month per college into the state financial system.

Buying a single integrated product has disappointed elsewhere too. Tyton Partners' 2017 national advising study covered more than 2,200 administrators and advisors at roughly 1,400 institutions. Institutions using fully integrated student success suites, the bundled advising platforms sold as one product, were less likely to report advising success, and less satisfied with their products, than institutions combining point solutions, meaning single-purpose tools. The 2023 follow-up measured advising integration technologies on the Net Promoter Score. The score subtracts the share of users who would advise against a product from the share who would recommend it. Advising integration technologies scored minus 35.

A quarter of students say they have one place to go

A one-stop shop consolidates non-academic services such as registration, billing, financial aid, and records into one office. In a 2022 Student Voice survey of 2,239 undergraduates, fielded by College Pulse for Inside Higher Ed with Kaplan's support, 25 percent of students said they had access to one, and another 40 percent did not know whether their college offers one. The survey also asked students to report experiences it labeled "bad customer service," office by office. Financial aid drew reports from 20 percent of students, more than any other office. Of the 1,578 students who reported poor service, 15 percent tried to get it resolved.

In Tyton Partners' 2023 study, more than 35 percent of students were unaware of critical support services their institution already runs. In the fall 2024 Trellis Strategies survey of 53,158 undergraduates at 104 institutions, the share of students who felt their institution was aware of their financial situation was 38 percent.

Methodology

Every figure in this piece comes from a dedicated fact base compiled for this research, whose sources were fetched and confirmed on August 21, 2026, either directly or through dated Internet Archive snapshots where publishers block automated access. Every number traces to a source in the list above; nothing was carried in from memory or from unverified web copy.

EDUCAUSE Core Data Service figures are medians across reporting U.S. institutions, and the reporting pool skews toward EDUCAUSE members; the piece says "reporting institutions" throughout. The run/grow/transform split is the fiscal 2015-16 figure (680 institutions), the most recent split verified in this research pass, and it is dated wherever it appears; the published shares sum to 95 percent, and Figure 1 renders the remainder as unclassified. The June 2025 QuickPoll is an informal three-day community poll of 165 respondents whose questions were co-developed with AWS, a vendor of data-modernization services; both caveats are disclosed in the body and figure captions.

The ctcLink figures rest on The Spokesman-Review's contemporaneous reporting of the Washington State Auditor's Office findings. The performance-audit PDF itself could not be retrieved this pass, and the figures will be checked against the auditor's report at sao.wa.gov directly; until then they are carried as press-reported.

Two circulating figures were examined and excluded. "The average university runs 900+ applications" traces to Salesforce/MuleSoft's cross-industry Connectivity Benchmark (organizations above $500 million in revenue, no education sample) and is banned as a higher education claim. "72% of institutions struggle with data fragmentation," attributed in vendor blogs to a 2023 EDUCAUSE report, could not be found in any verifiable EDUCAUSE document; the verified 51 percent siloed-data figure is used instead. ListEdTech and Tyton Partners figures are labeled as market research with populations attached; the Student Voice survey is press-produced with sponsor disclosure; Trellis Strategies figures carry the survey's n and response rate.

The absence of a published count of systems per institution was verified as an absence: EDUCAUSE CDS publishes deployment percentages by category, ListEdTech publishes categories and spend, and no federal or peer-reviewed count was found. The piece states the absence as a finding. The economics of the missing joined number belong to a companion piece, cross-referenced at "The full price of a graduate has never been published".