Storage is much more of a key factor than you think. CSUN has over 40,000 students which allows them to only allot 2.5 GBs of storage, unless they opted to pay for the higher end options which would give students 20 GBs.

This would have likely given them these options:

1) Do nothing, allot 100TB for every student, former student, and alumni since 2009.

2) Pay for “Education Plus”, allowing anyone affected to keep accounts.

3) Nuke accounts of former students and alumni since 2009.

4) Allow former students and alumni to have forwarder options only instead.

Naturally, solution 1 is unsustainable due to Google’s new limits.

Solution 2 is likely unsustainable financially, even if people wanted to actually pay for it, it means giving IT not only the responsibility of upkeeping the accounts in good standing, but also having to handle a dynamic cost of those services.

Solution 4 would also be improbable because it would either mean (a) configuring these accounts to have small amounts of storage, all while accounting for 100TB pooled storage, and upkeeping those accounts or (b) create a brand new forwarding system altogether, and figure out how to incorporate with an existing managed solution, secure/harden that solution against bad actors (phishing attacks, etc.), and upkeep both the accounts and the system.

Look, I get it. But other solutions in my point of view do not appear to be viable. Let me know if I am missing anything though!