Ben Sasse, who stepped down in July as president of the University of Florida, has drawn scrutiny for his office’s spending since The Independent Florida Alligator, the university’s student newspaper, detailed how it had ballooned, compared with his predecessor. Among other line items, the university signed a $4.7-million contract with the global consulting firm McKinsey & Company in March 2023, one month after Sasse, who’d previously served as a Republican U.S. senator for Nebraska, assumed his new role. (Sasse also formerly worked as an adviser to McKinsey on an hourly contract, according to The New York Times.)
The consulting firm would help the institution chart a path forward, a university spokesperson told the Alligator last year, when it first reported on the contract. In the intervening months, public details about McKinsey’s work at UF remained scant. The university kept its consulting expenses “largely under wraps,” the Alligator wrote in its story on Sasse’s spending, “leaving the public in the dark about what the contracted firms did to earn their fees.” After that story — which also described Sasse as hiring former Senate staffers to highly paid remote positions — was published, a wave of criticism followed, including from the state’s chief financial officer, who wrote on the social-media platform X that reports of Sasse’s “exorbitant spending” are “concerning” and should be investigated.
Sasse, who’d cited his ailing wife as the reason for his resignation, defended those expenses on X. He listed various initiatives, like setting a goal for at least 10 UF academic disciplines to become “an undisputed national leader within a decade,” using data analytics to improve course scheduling, and teaming up with Florida’s space industry. “Did some top-tier consulting firms compete to advise on important initiatives like those itemized above? Of course,” Sasse wrote. He added that “we also cut spending and consulting expenses in some areas … but countervailing accounting realities aren’t sexy amid breathless social media.”
Still, what exactly that $4.7 million had paid for was largely unknown until Wednesday, when the university fulfilled The Chronicle’s public-records request for all reports, including presentations, submitted by McKinsey to the university under its contract. The 520-page cache consists of eight individual documents that date from August 2023 to March 2024.
The earliest report, titled “University of Florida: The Road Ahead,” spells out trends across higher education, like that students entering college today “have larger preparedness gaps and mental-health challenges than we’ve seen in decades” and that the tenure of a college president is currently “lower than ever before.” That August 2023 document, which, like all of the documents provided to The Chronicle, was marked as preliminary, also assessed the university’s “strengths and opportunities” — for instance, its affordability and its retention rate for first-year full-time students. Among its “challenges” are that its “academic reputation and impact may lag behind [its] overall ranking.”
Another document, dated January 2024, describes feedback from a survey in which UF faculty members identified various “pain points” that make their jobs more difficult. Issues with travel and expenses got the most mentions, followed by information technology. With respect to the latter category, “how many platforms does a faculty member need to master?” asked one respondent in submitted comments. “It seems every time we master one, it isn’t long until [the] existing platform is retired and we are asked to learn another new one — I am all for lifelong learning, but this is not what I think we have in mind.” That survey feedback helped inform various proposals to reduce the administrative burden on professors that McKinsey outlines in other documents.
It’s not clear if McKinsey’s work for the university is finished. The contract’s end date is February 2025. UF did not respond to a Wednesday-afternoon request for comment about whether the consulting firm had done everything it had been paid to do.
You can read all 520 pages of what McKinsey produced for the university here:
