“Anyone who’s spent a few months at a sizable tech company can tell you that a lot of software seems to exist primarily because companies have hired people to write and maintain them. In some ways, the software serves not the business, but the people who have written it, and then those who need to maintain it. This is stupid, but also very, very true.“

This is exactly what happened to higher education. It seems to be a kind of entropy that signals that a system is in major need of complete overhaul so it can get back to doing what it was actually designed to do.