A student can stream an entire season of a show on a cracked phone in a moving car. They can check their bank balance, locate their roommate and order dinner—all without stopping to think about how it works.
But when they try to launch SolidWorks, AutoCAD or Python for class, they’re met with a compatibility warning, a 40-minute download and an error message.
The classroom isn’t defined by four walls anymore. We’ve poured millions into LMS integrations, wireless upgrades and digital equity initiatives, yet most applications remain tethered to labs.
It’s frustrating but it’s entirely solvable.
Disconnect between infrastructure and experience
There’s a gap between the experience students expect and the one we think we’re providing. We imagine we’ve moved into the cloud era. But most universities are still in the IT equivalent of legacy code.
Every time a student struggles to access software, we’re reminded of the opportunity to reimagine access—making every moment of their education seamless, efficient, and worthy of their investment.
At Purdue University, one of the top engineering schools in the country, students on different campuses were running different versions of the same software. Faculty were losing precious class time to technical workarounds.
Some of the most advanced students in the country were being forced to sit and wait because the delivery system was out of sync with the environment they were learning in. Purdue met that challenge head-on by simplifying access to software delivery.
Rethinking the role of IT in student success
Software access isn’t solely an IT issue—it’s much larger, encompassing pedagogy, retention and even competition.
Michigan Technological University didn’t wait for another cycle of help desk tickets to come to that conclusion. They moved their entire library of applications to a centralized delivery platform, shifting from machines that took 24 hours to reimage to environments that were reset in 30 minutes.
This shift allowed human capital previously allocated for maintenance to be refocused toward innovation and students could easily access critical software for institutional achievement anywhere on any device.
What practical progress looks like
Fixing the application access problem doesn’t require tearing out infrastructure or embarking on a years-long transformation plan. The most effective changes come from focused, strategic shifts that reflect today’s learning environments.
First step—move away from fragmented application delivery. A centralized delivery approach that brings together cloud-native, virtualized, web-based and locally installed applications into one cohesive, user-friendly interface reduces troubleshooting and eliminates confusion. It also reduces support overhead by giving IT a single pane of glass to manage and monitor software usage across the institution.
Device flexibility is foundational and critical to academic rigor. Students bring Chromebooks, aging PCs, personal Macs or nothing at all and expect high performance across the university IT ecosystem. Backend GPU-powered servers that recognize device limitations and compensate automatically allow students to participate fully, regardless of their hardware situation.
Progress also comes from faculty collaboration. At Purdue, the shift toward centralized software delivery was a response to a very specific pain: faculty losing instructional time to technical hurdles.
The solution wasn’t just to streamline IT—it was to build a system that served the teaching mission. Faculty gained consistency, students got predictability and IT became a partner.
Then there’s data. Meaningful usage analytics that reveal how applications are being used across departments and semesters drives smarter licensing decisions and empowers departments to sunset underutilized tools and justifies renewals and budget increases with precision, even helping to grow burgeoning programs.
At Michigan Tech, transitioning from seat-based to user-based licensing surfaced untapped opportunities to make applications more widely available—without breaking licensing agreements or IT budgets.
The future arrives
Generation Alpha is next. Their expectations will dwarf anything Gen Z has brought to campus. They will arrive fluent in automation, allergic to friction and skeptical of any system that isn’t instantaneous.
Institutions that address software access and build the infrastructure to support today’s students and the new generation of learners will thrive.
