14 votes

The rise and fall of the higher education empires

Topic deleted by author

6 comments

  1. [6]
    krellor
    (edited )
    Link
    A darkly humorous read for anyone whose spent enough time in higher ed. Lots of well intentioned program expansions without the hard decisions to stop doing other things leading to lopsided...

    A darkly humorous read for anyone whose spent enough time in higher ed. Lots of well intentioned program expansions without the hard decisions to stop doing other things leading to lopsided budgets.

    I do find it somewhat humorous though that office 365 subscriptions and high speed internet made the rant list. Those (within reason) seem to be pretty good investments for academics and research. Now the fourth incarnation of student success that seems to do everything but work directly with students in crisis because legal says the hard cases should be referred to professionals, makes a lot more sense to me.

    As a fun aside, I ran the engineering teams for a university system once upon a time and operated a 100Gbps private wan with IX peerings. The largest bandwidth consumer wasn't the high performance research networks. Sure, they could spike once and a while moving petabytes of genomics data. No, it was the dorm networks that routinely sustained >50Gbps. I had to bring in dedicated peerings with media companies just to offload that from our commercial peerings.

    6 votes
    1. [3]
      public
      Link Parent
      Dorm bandwidth could’ve been greatly reduced if students were encouraged to pirate and share locally instead of streaming. Bring back the sneakernet.

      Dorm bandwidth could’ve been greatly reduced if students were encouraged to pirate and share locally instead of streaming. Bring back the sneakernet.

      7 votes
      1. Plik
        Link Parent
        I got put on academic probation for running a DC server across the dorms 🤣. Oddly enough I randomly met some of the PB guys many years later.

        I got put on academic probation for running a DC server across the dorms 🤣.

        Oddly enough I randomly met some of the PB guys many years later.

        3 votes
      2. krellor
        Link Parent
        I took great pride in shielding students from IP based legal inquiries but there are limits, and pirating can be a vector for malware for the less savvy. Realistically, students just wanted their...

        I took great pride in shielding students from IP based legal inquiries but there are limits, and pirating can be a vector for malware for the less savvy.

        Realistically, students just wanted their Netflix and Apple TV to work, and their competitive gaming events to go off without a hitch. I forget which game, but we saw a massive spike due to a competitive gaming event of people watching streams and participating that caught is off guard!

        3 votes
    2. [2]
      Jasontherand
      Link Parent
      Those do seem like good investments to us, since we are tech people, but I think maybe the underlying fallacy here is that each of the things described here did make sense individually at the...

      Those do seem like good investments to us, since we are tech people, but I think maybe the underlying fallacy here is that each of the things described here did make sense individually at the time.
      A lot of the centralization and specialization makes sense in the moment, but after a few years they don't make sense and don't restructure those management roles.

      2 votes
      1. krellor
        Link Parent
        Oh, I know, I just find it funny. You've nailed it exactly, it is always one more thing to try and centrally fund, one more thing to try and cover with indirect rates, which leads to increases in...

        Oh, I know, I just find it funny. You've nailed it exactly, it is always one more thing to try and centrally fund, one more thing to try and cover with indirect rates, which leads to increases in indirects, etc

        Out of date at this point, but I think I paid around $10 per student and employee FTE to get:

        • Office 365 for all headcount including 5TB OneDrive storage.
        • Teams, with a convoluted storage cap system.
        • Office downloads and installs for 25 devices per FTE, managed by each individual.
        • Hosted exchange for all users with a 1TB storage limit.
        • Unlimited on premise Windows server enterprise OS installs.

        Later, when I sat on the budget committee that managed the university budget, I probably would have been pilloried if I suggested dropping that offering. 🙂

        2 votes