I was going to say this. Developing an LMS or really any tool is not cheap. You would be saving $1M/yr from MS but paying out $2M/yr in dev costs.

You do not necessarily need to hire these devs yourself, though. It can be managed by the legal entity overseeing regular development, like the LibreOffice foundation.

Don't most universities host their own software?

A few years ago they did, but Google, Microsoft, and some of the cloud LMS companies have started to shift them onto the cloud.

As someone who had a university IT dept as a client, it's honestly much better for the school. University IT is almost universally a disaster and bottleneck.

LMS we still host (Moodle), but student registration is just cheaper and easier to get a company to host (We use Empower).

I've noticed even the strapped for money TCUs have hosted LMS more often than not. We went against the grain on that one.

Office365 is just so cheap for students (The e-mail is free if you just use that) that it makes total sense to pick that.

It’s a mix. Current ERP solutions for higher ed are offered self-hosted or SaaS. Ancillary solutions are moving quickly towards SaaS only. Larger R1 schools are more likely to have solutions they built entirely in-house. Most schools have highly customized versions of COTS products.

Source: I work for a leading supplier of those solutions.

I’m not sure about most, perhaps some do but the ones I’m aware of are using Office365 or similar.