We all know the cost of education is huge. It seems that budgets are so tight there are limited discretionary funds available to do much new and different. School boards in Ontario have experienced the imposition of commissioners to control spending within the allocated limits.  Yet if we look at the whole process of cohorts moving through the K-12 and higher education systems we would realize that the sooner the students acquire their essential skills the more tools for learning they would possess and presumably the more they would learn in subsequent years. There is a compounding effect. But, to rely on the higher education level to do essential skills training seems to be more expensive. It is also late in the cohort time line of maturation. As long as the freshmen at colleges and universities continue to have major shortcomings in computer skills essential skills remediation will need to continue.  If higher education adopts the standard and recognized incoming cohorts that already have attained the standard, they will call forth earlier efforts in the student development and the costs of remediating essential skills will diminish.
The standard offers opportunities for saving
But we are talking about general skills that everyone needs. It is hard to see that the skills in the use of a computer for college or university students would vary much between subjects, just as it is likely so for math or English. Certain generic subjects act as building blocks. Yet each Faculty sets their own curriculum -- many colleges in Canada have as many versions of Introduction to Computing as they have faculties (read 30+). One former President of such a publicly funded college indicated to me that each different class fielded can require more than 2 person-years in development, updating and coordination of its delivery.  Think of the savings that using a common standard like ICDL could achieve. 
ICDL stays current everywhere
The business of keeping things current by each institution is reduced to simply following the progression of the ICDL standards’ updates. ICDL does this through regular Syllabus updates and corresponding testing and courseware reflections for each new generation of common software.
Operational savings abound
Savings don’t end there. There are more indirect costs and frustrations for higher education that can be reduced or eliminated by adopting the ICDL standard.
1) Transferring students between programs is extensive and the lack of commonality in what material has been covered makes it difficulty to determine the equivalencies.
2) Students returning to higher education could come with their ICDL certification. If they already have the necessary capability, the institution saves the cost of keeping a place for them.  The more of these that are attracted to the institution the more resources are freed for strategic use in the meeting the roles of higher education. 
3) International students can be attracted to colleges that recognize their attainment of the international standard by granting advanced standing and transfer credits for validated ICDL certificates.
4) Students looking for work will be able to indicate their achievement of  this international standard, more recognized than the typical Introduction to Computing 101. 
5) The ICDL Core standard can be applied along with more advanced ICDL certifications to maintain continuity in higher level skills development like spreadsheets in faculties such as Business Studies or database in Health Administration Studies.
Adopting ICDL Canada Services can lead to further reduced workload and cost savings.