Armies of administrators, shiny new amenities to attract more students (competing on quality of education is too difficult / more expensive). There's probably some good that it goes towards too, but its hard not to be cynical about it.
I was a one of two developers at a small relatively unknown private college (costs over $70k and wasn't even top 5 in this state) in a communications (see: marketing B team for admissions, mostly PR and crisis response) department of around 15. I cannot emphasize how inept and slow everyone was. Simple tasks took 10x longer than they should. There were 3-4 people dedicated solely to managing contractors for the bi-annual magazine that likely gets tossed by 90% of the recipients, then people whose sole job was to manage an ad agency in a committee with at least 4 other people. They were in the 6 month process of launching a 5 page WP site for the newly funded careers institute that had ~15 employees to try and help graduates find jobs paying more than $15/hr with their newly minted liberal arts degrees when I finally left. Their solution for making soon/new graduates more employable? Linkedin courses for specific skills like digital marketing, Excel and microcertificates through external resources.
Then there are other leaks, like $50k/yr hosting bills for a CMS serving under 200k pageviews per day, or other ancillary a11y compliance tools that cost nearly as much. If there is budget, it has to be spent.
In the past, people with sinecures could just go home and spend their time painting or composing poetry or inventing scientific disciplines or something else not-entirely-useless. Now they’re managing contractors by committee! How soul-deadening.
Pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy at play again.
At this point, my feeling is that the local maximumizations that have driven us to this point are irrecoverable. There is no “fixing” this system. It will carry on for a while yet out of momentum, but something disruptive will dethrone it eventually.
For most cases it should just be a drop in replacement. IIRC they promise not to break the API between point releases (except tf.contrib.* which may change or disappear entirely...)
