Across nine years of publishing, a conservative impact model puts the value of recovered faculty and staff time at $157 million, reinforcing Simple Higher Ed's commitment to giving educators time and resources back.
TAMPA, Fla., Sept. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Simple Higher Ed announced that colleges and universities have published 3 million course-section syllabi through Simple Syllabus over the company's nine-year history. With more than 600 institutions using Simple Higher Ed technology this fall term, the milestone reflects a growing commitment to helping educators reclaim time for teaching and student support.
Using its conservative ROI model, Simple Higher Ed estimates that the 3 million syllabi published over its nine-year history represent 2.85 million hours of recovered faculty and staff time, valued at approximately $157 million.
The calculation uses a three-year adoption framework that accounts for instructor learning, campus implementation, and growing usage. It also reserves time for faculty review and includes the administrative work of finding and routing syllabi.
For institutions such as Palm Beach State College, the benefits begin with a more consistent process for preparing and maintaining course information.
"By providing faculty with a streamlined, centrally supported template and keeping required institutional language current, the platform has reduced the administrative effort involved in building, reviewing, and updating syllabi," said Roger L. Yohe, Ph.D., Vice President of Academic Innovation and Strategy at Palm Beach State College. "It also gives our staff a clearer, more reliable way to support faculty while helping ensure students have access to complete, up-to-date course information."
That efficiency extends beyond preparing for a new term. Accreditation reviews, transfer evaluations, and records requests can send staff searching across folders and email attachments. A centralized repository makes published syllabi easier to find, with the analysis estimating approximately 125,000 hours of time saved through more efficient retrieval and routing.
The value of that recovered time comes from what teams can do with it. At New Mexico State University, Maha Migdadi points to the opportunity to spend more time supporting faculty and students.
"Simple Syllabus has allowed us to spend less time on manual, repetitive tasks and more time focusing on supporting our faculty and students," said Maha Migdadi, Ph.D., Enterprise Instructional Technology Administrator at New Mexico State University.
Digital distribution also offers a useful perspective on resource use. Assuming eight pages per syllabus and 25 students per section, printing one single-sided copy for each student would require 600 million sheets of paper. That volume would weigh approximately 3,000 U.S. tons and form a stack nearly 38 miles high.
At an illustrative five cents per page, printing would cost $30 million. Scaling an Environmental Paper Network Calculator benchmark associates that paper volume with approximately 67,000 tree equivalents and 71 million gallons of water use.
As Simple Higher Ed grows, its focus remains on the work educators face every term. Simplifying updates, publishing, and access to course information gives faculty and academic teams more room to support and keep costs affordable for their students.
Institutions can explore their own potential results using theSimple Syllabus ROI calculator.
Media Contact
Matthew Compton-Clark, Simple Higher Ed, 1 (813) 279-5443, [email protected], simplehighered.com
SOURCE Simple Higher Ed
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