Chronicle of Higher Education Op-Ed:  How Colleges Can Kick Their Addiction to Consultants, by Hollis Robbins (University of Utah):

American colleges are spending far too much on consulting firms. … They signal a fundamental crisis in higher-education leadership: the belief that external consultants, rather than internal expertise, hold the keys to institutional transformation.

But 2025 will mark the end of this era, as artificial intelligence (AI) emerges as a more-capable, cost-effective alternative. New premium models such as OpenAI’s GPT-4o, Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Google Gemini are capable of ever more sophisticated data aggregation, analysis, scenario planning, and interpretation. Adopting such technology will help keep strategic knowledge where it belongs: within the institution itself.

In The Big Con: How the Consulting Industry Weakens Our Businesses, Infantilizes Our Governments, and Warps Our Economies (2023), the economists Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington criticize consulting firms for hollowing out government-sector expertise: “The costs incurred are often much higher than if government had invested in the capacity to do the job and learned how to improve processes along the way,” they write. “Internal expertise all too often gets shunned in favor of contracting a global consultancy.” This creates an expertise deficit, since “the less an organization does something, the less it knows how to do it.” …

A similar dynamic obtains in the higher-education sector.

When top administrators hire outside consultants, they risk destroying the leadership bench in their own organizations and leaving themselves less able to prepare for changes ahead. The problem with hiring a firm like McKinsey has always been that its consultants come away better than the client, both as a matter of pocketbook and of wisdom. This is particularly worrisome in higher ed, where the whole point is the creation and development of knowledge. Every university that hires an efficiency or reorganization consultant is effectively announcing publicly that it doesn’t trust its own people.

When colleges outsource their strategic thinking to consulting firms, they systematically hollow out their own capacity for pattern recognition, innovation, and scenario planning. Each time a consultant produces an efficiency analysis or strategic plan, they don’t just walk away with millions in fees, they don’t value that institutional knowledge — local knowledge — that should have been leveraged and developed internally. This expertise exodus creates a vicious cycle: As colleges become more dependent on external consultants, their internal teams become less capable of handling complex challenges, leading to even more consulting engagements. …

The choice facing college leaders in 2025 will be clear: pay premium rates for consultants who extract institutional knowledge while providing political cover — or embrace AI solutions that empower internal teams to prepare for changes to come. The stakes extend beyond mere efficiency. Institutions that successfully transition from consultant dependency to AI-enhanced internal capacity will emerge stronger, more adaptable, and better positioned to fulfill their educational missions. In an era when higher education faces unprecedented challenges, the end of the consultant era might be exactly what colleges need to rediscover their capacity for self-directed innovation and change. The consultants are indeed leaving, and it’s about time.

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