80K euro might sound like a lot until you realise it is around the combined annual salary for two mid-level employees in Western Europe, and for about a team of four to five in Eastern Europe.
To ask a team of designers to do brand and marketing research and design a new logo for a big organisation that will use said logo everywhere is not a 1K euro freelancer job.
To be fair, the new logo is a bit crap, but in the grand scheme of things, 80K is not a lot at all.
You assume that the salary is what it costs for the company to have an employee. You need to at least double that.
There is overhead for the person itself (employer subsidized healthcare, office space, equipment) and there is overhead within the organization. Like a secretary and accounting departments who cannot be billed to a client. And management layers of course…
Most likely the 80k are enough to cover one person-year for a consulting agency in Eastern Europe.
The point is that a public university doesn't gain anything from a good logo, so really anything over $0 is too much. And that $80K doesn't take into account the probably much larger expense of updating that logo throughout the university.
Universities, cities, regions and countries do have PR departments.
Arguably the public image of a university is its most important asset. Because that attracts the best students, researchers and third party funding (public and private).
To ask a team of designers to do brand and marketing research and design a new logo for a big organisation that will use said logo everywhere is not a 1K euro freelancer job.
To be fair, the new logo is a bit crap, but in the grand scheme of things, 80K is not a lot at all.