Median U.S. higher-ed central IT spend ~$10.6M/yr; compensation ~half, nearly entirely fixed

EDUCAUSE Core Data Service, FY2022-23 collection, reports that the median U.S. higher-education institution spends $10.6 million per year on central IT (interquartile range $4.8M-$25.3M across 320-400 reporting institutions). Compensation accounts for approximately half of that — $5.2 million — and it is nearly entirely fixed. Staff turnover runs at 8% annually, and during budget reductions 49% of institutions implement hiring freezes alongside 31% layoffs and 32% retirement/layoff incentives.

For C-0006, the implication is that the central IT line item is already paid for and largely fixed. The institutional decision is not "should we spend $10.6M on IT?" — that money is already being spent every year. The decision is whether to use the capacity that spend already buys to run protocol-level preservation nodes. Once compensation, physical plant, and bandwidth contracts are committed, the marginal cost of layering Tier 3 deployment on top of them is bounded by what the existing staff can absorb, which the TU Dortmund / TU Dresden / MIT SIPB cases (E-0057) show to be small.