The Consultants Are Coming!
When colleges slash programs, outside consultants often play a pivotal role: taking the blame.
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In this episode, Jack Stripling talks with David Jesse about the ways outside consultants are helping cash-strapped colleges cut programs — and taking the heat for it too.
Related Reading:
- When Cost-Cutting Universities Hire Consultants, Who’s Really Making the Decisions?
- Is Higher Ed Growing or Shrinking?
- Gordon Gee’s Last Stand
Guest: David Jesse, senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education
Transcript
This transcript was produced using a speech recognition software. It was reviewed by production staff, but may contain errors. Please email us at collegematters@chronicle.com
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In this episode, Jack Stripling talks with David Jesse about the ways outside consultants are helping cash-strapped colleges cut programs — and taking the heat for it too.
Related Reading:
- When Cost-Cutting Universities Hire Consultants, Who’s Really Making the Decisions?
- Is Higher Ed Growing or Shrinking?
- Gordon Gee’s Last Stand
Guest: David Jesse, senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education
Transcript
This transcript was produced using a speech recognition software. It was reviewed by production staff, but may contain errors. Please email us at collegematters@chronicle.com if you have any questions.
Jack Stripling This is College Matters from the Chronicle.
David Jesse If you are on a college or university campus anywhere across the United States, I would say if you haven’t already seen one of these consultants on your campus going through one of these reviews, it’s coming in the next couple of years for you.
Jack Stripling: What does a college need to offer to call itself a college? Foreign languages? Literature? Maybe some business courses? As many colleges across the country confront financial pressures and enrollment declines, heated conversations are underway about what majors and programs must be preserved — and what can be discarded. Jobs are at stake. Options for students are constricting. And the very idea of what it means to be a university is in flux. But colleges aren’t navigating this fraught terrain alone. Many have hired outside consultants to help with the slashing. That’s what happened recently at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where 20 programs, including majors in anthropology and physics, have been identified for elimination. To better understand the role consultants play in this kind of process, my colleague David Jesse teamed up recently with Erin Gretzinger, a higher ed reporter at The Assembly, to investigate the Greensboro program cuts. Today on the show, we’ll talk with David about how the often opaque work of outside consultants is transforming the very idea of higher education. I brought David on the show today to talk about his reporting with Erin. David is one of the country’s best shoe leather higher ed reporters known for his deep dives into how colleges work. David, welcome to the show.
David Jesse Thanks for having me on, Jack. Always good to talk with you.
Jack Stripling Good to have you. Good to have you. So what’s happening in higher education that makes consultants such prominent players?
David Jesse Well, I think the first thing we have to talk about is the fact that more and more colleges and universities are just having a hard time financially. The money that once was rolling in and swelling coffers and making everybody feel great and able to spend on whatever they wanted to is disappearing as enrollment trends change around and as fewer students are out in the system to come to school. And so there’s been this money crunch. And even schools like UNC-Greensboro, that normally have not had financial difficulties are now starting to feel the crunch. And administrators are starting to look at their spreadsheets and their budget and say, you know we might not have all the money we need to do everything we might want to do. And so then that leads to a question of how do we decide what to cut and what to keep? And so there’s been this growth industry of these consultants that have popped up who will come in and help them make these decisions.
Jack Stripling So why are they feeling this crunch, this economic pressure?
David Jesse A lot of it has to do with just the straight numbers. There are fewer and fewer high school graduate age students in America, especially when you’re in the Midwest where I’m located or in the East. Some of those places, there’s just not as many 18 year olds out there who can go to college. And so as those numbers shrink, there’s more and more competition. There’s fewer students going to schools. And so that, of course, leads to money problems. Tuition is still a huge driver of money, especially for private schools. And then you also have disinvestment over decades in public education, public higher education by the states. And so that’s all combined to just shrink that pot of money flowing into the bank accounts of universities.
Jack Stripling And in this environment, college leaders are saying, help, right? Somebody come in here and help me. Which is where we get these consultants. So how are these folks received when they come to town?
David Jesse Well, they’re really seen as kind of the boogeyman or the hatchet man, you know, that they’re arriving on campus is not a good thing. You know, faculty member after faculty member will tell you, hey, look, I heard that so-and-so is coming to town. What’s going to be cut? I talked to a faculty union president up at the University of Connecticut for this reporting, and he said, you know, we’re just waiting for the shoe to drop. We know there’s going to be cuts coming, but we don’t know what there is. And so there’s this real fear that takes over on a campus when the administration announces or the board hires rpk Group or Huron or any number of these consultants to come in, everybody knows what’s coming and it’s not going to be good.
Jack Stripling These consultants come to town. There’s a lot of fear about what they’re going to do. There’s a lot of skepticism about them. What do they do?
David Jesse Well, most of them are just starting with just kind of the data gathering, who is taking classes? How many students are in Professor Jack’s class on left-handed basket weaving and how many...
Jack Stripling Lots, lots, David.
David Jesse Well, I’ve heard good things about your teaching style. And who doesn’t want to be able to weave baskets, right? And how many students are in Professor David’s higher economics class? You know, and...
Jack Stripling Why did you get the better class here?
David Jesse Well, cause it’s my example. But so these consultants look at those numbers. How many students are there? And then they look at how much does it cost to put on that class? So how much are we paying, Professor Jack? At least 4 or 5 times more than we’re paying, Professor David. Is that worth it if he’s not teaching as many, as many students and then they just do that over and over again to gather all that data in a spreadsheet and then to say, well, it looks like nobody is using or very few students are using these resources and it’s costing us all this money. Now, what happens next kind of depends on the college. They could decide, well, that’s okay. We think the real growth industry in jobs is in basket weaving, so we got to keep Jack’s class around. Or they might say there’s no growth in basket weaving. He doesn’t make any money. He’s actually costing us a ton of money and that’s the only course he teaches. So we’re going to shut that down and then, sorry Jack, it’s time to look for a new job.
Jack Stripling Yeah, I’m reminded of the Office Space scene when the consultants come and say, “What would you say you do here?” Sounds like that experience. And I, turns out I did not do favorably in this review, which is unfortunate. The place that you really looked at closely was a group called rpk Consulting Group. Folks who’ve been around higher education have probably heard of them. But tell me a little bit about them and why you wanted to focus specifically on them.
David Jesse Well, there certainly are a number of firms going around the country going from campus to campus. This particular firm founded by Rick Staisloff’s got to be one of the more prominent ones. Rick founded the firm after he was the chief financial officer at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland. That’s now known as Notre Dame of Maryland University. And while he was there and was CFO, he started asking a variety of questions like: Where are the resources going? Who’s taking what classes? Then he started talking at various industry gatherings and started thinking about it. And finally he just sort of decided, well, you know, I think I can make a business out of this. We’ve read a lot about him lately, too. He was involved, his company was involved, at West Virginia University, where 28 undergraduate majors and graduate programs, including, like every foreign language they offered and more than 140 faculty positions, tenured and non tenured ones, were cut. So the firm’s very prominent in some of the biggest cuts and the most controversial cuts that we’ve been reading about lately.
Jack Stripling Like you say, rpk is a big name in higher education consulting. But this West Virginia story just, it captured national attention, I think, because here is a major public research university that made some dramatic cuts that seemed to get right at the heart of what, like a college’s for, what it does, what people can access in that part of the country. That was a huge story, right?
David Jesse Yeah, because it was, it was so big of a cut right? 28 programs. I mean, that’s a lot. And 140 some positions, faculty positions. Again, you know, they’re the major player in West Virginia. This isn’t some small private school. This is a flagship university. And if they’re suffering, it raises questions about everybody else.
Jack Stripling And so rpk comes to UNC-Greensboro with all that baggage. What are people thinking? Oh, these are the West Virginia people.
David Jesse Yeah, exactly right. These are the West Virginia… we know what’s going on. Not only the West Virginia folks, but they have done a number of other schools. And I think you see a number of faculty members now becoming much more aware of what happens when these consultants show up. You and I and our colleagues at the Chronicle write about them all the time. People understand what outcomes are, and so they’re nervous.
Jack Stripling So faculty might look at cutting all these language programs at West Virginia and be horrified. Administrators might think, huh, that’s interesting. Do you think that some people see what happened there as a success story, even if they wouldn’t talk about that?
David Jesse I’m sure they do, right? Because if you are a CFO or if you’re a provost or you’re a president and you’re staring a massive deficit in the eyes, you’re looking at that number and your 20 million or 40 million or 10 million, whatever the number is, out of whack. You’ve got to make cuts. You can look at that process and be like, well, you know what? They trim stuff and the stuff they trimmed was stuff that doesn’t affect a ton of students.
Jack Stripling Yeah, and you know, people who follow higher ed will know that Gordon Gee is president there. This guy has been around higher education for a long time. And one of the things he told our colleague Emma Pettit was, Hey, I knew that the faculty on our campus was going to vote no confidence in me after we did this. That was baked in the cake. So this is the thing that I’m also noticing about these processes, and I emailed with Dr. Gee about this, too. You know, college leaders know they’re going to catch flack for this. They go into it knowing it. The boards know it. A lot of the traditional types of outrage that faculty put forward in moments like this, that’s just sort of expected. And I think when it’s expected that maybe it matters less; the board is, kind of knows that this is going to happen, right?
David Jesse So we know that this also happened at UNC-Greensboro. So we sent a request to the university that said, hey, look it, under state law, your emails between administrators, between administrators and rpk are public record. They’re open to the viewing of the public. And so we’d like them. We’d like everything, you know, over a course of a year, year and a half that the university was communicating with rpk and we got hundreds and hundreds of emails back. And it’s interesting because one of the first in fact it might have actually been the first email from the university to rpk comes from Bob Shea, who is UNCG’s university Vice Chancellor for Finance and administration right there, chief financial person. And in January 2023, he says explicitly, Hey, look at we know we’re going to get a no confidence vote. But we know we need to change some stuff here. He said, and I’m quoting now, he said, “Most everyone here believes we have no fat to cut. I believe otherwise.” And so, yeah, right from the start he’s setting up, there’s going to be cuts and we know we’re going to get pushback and we’re ready for it. Help us figure out how we’re going to handle it and where we’re going to make the best cuts. And so then he had ideas. He said, well, maybe we could outsource custodial work or we could merge or centralize police dispatch units. We could cut secretarial jobs. You know, so he had some thoughts about where cuts might be made.
Jack Stripling So a key administrator in understanding this financial picture, before he’s even looked at any of this supposedly objective outside data, is mentioning things that he thinks could be cut.
David Jesse Exactly. He’s saying, I think there’s cuts here. I think there’s cuts here. I think there’s cuts here. Now, what does the data show? And how can I use that data almost as a shield when I go out into the community, which I know is going to be upset about any cuts that I announce. And so can you help me gather the data and make some of these cuts maybe more palatable or more based on a very objective manner?
Jack Stripling Because now it’s not me saying this. It’s some objective third party.
David Jesse Right. It’s here’s this person who has no ties to the campus, right. And they’re coming in and they’re just looking at the data. And, you know, back to our class analogy, right: they’re looking at Professor David’s class and they’re looking at Professor Jack’s class and they’re saying there’s more students in Professor David’s class. He costs less anyway. We’re making money there, or at least we’re breaking even. Let’s keep him and let’s cut Professor Jack, even if all along, the university administrators have kind of known that they were going to cut Professor Jack for, you know, who knows what sorts of reasons? You know, faculty often believe that these cuts are, you know, motivated. Jack, you know, have you been spending a lot of time bad mouthing the president and the provost?
Jack Stripling: Yes.
David Jesse: in faculty meetings, right? You know, right. These are what these are what faculty sometimes think the decisions come down to. And the university administrators want that shield to be like, no, no, it wasn’t that. It was I mean, just look at this data. The data says we have to act this way.
Jack Stripling Stick around. We’ll be back in a minute.
[BREAK]
Jack Stripling So David, I’d like to dig a bit deeper into what a consulting group like rpk does once they get to campus. How did this process unfold at UNC-Greensboro?
David Jesse So rpk was hired. They came in to gather a bunch of data on who was going to classes, who, what departments were having strong enrollment, what majors lots of students were interested in and taking classes in. They gathered all this data from the university itself. Then it turns out there was some inaccuracies. There’s lots of wrangling back and forth over the data. The university established some metrics to kind of sort and rank all these different departments. Then over the course of time, they started putting those out into public in town halls and various things, and departments started to look, faculty members started to look and say, oh, it looks like we’re pretty safe. And then it got down to the time to make cuts and there were programs like the anthropology department who had looked and said, yeah, we’re good, who, when the cuts came out, were like, oh, we’re on the list. We’re being cut. And in total, the university ended up cutting 20 programs.
Jack Stripling So what’s the point of hiring a consultant to provide all this great data if you just end up ignoring their advice?
David Jesse You sound like you’re a member of the faculty at UNCG, or any of these other places. That’s exactly the issue here. Like is there any reason we spent all this money to get something that you’re just going to ignore?
Jack Stripling So, David, is there a clear villain in this story? I think a lot of faculty would like to say rpk came in as expected and told us to cut a bunch of programs and it’s their fault.
David Jesse Yeah, and I think it would make life much easier for me and for you when we write it and talk about this, right? To just be able to say this person is the, is the person who caused all the problems. But what we really saw, perhaps for the first time, thanks to all these public records and these emails, is that there is no one villain. It’s much more complex than that. It is based on data to some point. It’s also, you know, these cuts can be subjective still. The administrator can overrule the data and say, no, I think we should cut this program.
Jack Stripling So is there any evidence that at any point rpk Consulting comes in and whispers to the administration, you should cut biology, Spanish and journalism?
David Jesse No, we don’t see that. I mean, we, not in the records, at least. Now who knows what went on in one-on-one meetings, but where we can see it was much more like a menu, right? You and I decide we’re going to go to dinner. And so we’re out to dinner and a waiter comes over and they hand us the menu and there’s all this stuff on the menu that we can choose to order from. And that’s what rpk did. They brought the menu out and said, “Here’s all the data, here’s all the stuff you could possibly cut.” It’s still up to me or in this case, the administration, to make the order.
Jack Stripling In light of that. Here I go back into it. What did they order? Yeah, what did they cut?
David Jesse They cut about 20 programs. They were mostly concentrated in the humanities, which we have seen. There’s a great piece that ran in The Chronicle by one of our colleagues earlier this summer looking at all the cuts that have been going on all across the country. And when you look at those cuts, you can see that they are largely concentrated in the humanities, things like English and foreign language and art and all of that type of studying.
Jack Stripling All the things that make us better, more complete people.
David Jesse Yeah. And the argument, though, is all the stuff that doesn’t necessarily directly lead to a great paying job.
Jack Stripling Right. And, you know, as we heard from West Virginia and other places, if students aren’t taking them, colleges have to make a real choice as to whether you continue to offer it just to say you do.
David Jesse Yeah, which gets back to the core question of this. What makes a university a university? Does a university have to have a Spanish major? Does it have to have a British literature minor? Does it have to have a art appreciation class? Like what makes a university a university? I think that’s the stuff the presidents and provosts and faculty members who care about this stuff are really struggling with. What makes West Virginia University, West Virginia University? What makes University of North Carolina Greensboro a full university? And at what point do you not become what you once were?
Jack Stripling So how does a university decide what it doesn’t need to do anymore? What does this story tell us about that?
David Jesse Well, I think it tells us that it largely is coming down — or it certainly is been a shift towards making it based on dollars and cents, on how much money do we have, which is a certain number, and how do we spread that best? And so that means we’re going to look at that art appreciation class. We’re going to look at that British literature major. We’re going to look at the philosophy minor, and we’re going to say, you know, we’re not getting the number of students with their tuition dollars or research dollars tied to that coming in to pay for the professors we need to run that program, the graduate assistants to teach the lecture classes, all of that stuff that goes into it. And so I think the story showed what we have known that is becoming more and more like a business where if you are not making that budget number, the stuff that’s not contributing directly or is a drag on that budget is being cut or on the chopping block.
Jack Stripling So to simplify things a lot, there’s a clear tension that I see: Consultants are seen as sort of dispassionate, even ruthless evaluators of what does or doesn’t make a college money. And then you have these academics who might be seen as more enlightened. They get to think about whether somebody needs Shakespeare in her life in order to get a good education. But can we count on faculty to be objective about whether their own programs are essential?
David Jesse Well, there’s certainly self-interest, right? I mean, who’s going to recommend that they cut their own job? If I’m working at a newspaper and they come to me and say, you’ve got to cut four reporting positions, the odds are pretty good my recommendations are not going to be: cut me. So there definitely is some self-interest in there. I think it gets back to what is the mission of your university or college and how do you, how do you meet that and where do you direct your resources to? I’ve spent a lot of time with a lot of presidents who have talked about that being one of the things they really struggle with: What’s our mission and are we doing all that we can to fulfill that, even as budgets tighten and I don’t have as much money to spend as I maybe once would want.
Jack Stripling And I think that we should note that we’re talking about program cuts as if they are unequivocally sad; that when this happens, it’s a bad thing for the students who live in that community. It’s a bad thing for the faculty. But presumably, this is designed to save taxpayers money. Presumably, it is designed to bring down college costs. Do you have any sense that any of this is going to end up making college more affordable for people in North Carolina?
David Jesse I think it’s way too early to say that, you know, these cuts are just imposed. I think what it can do is it can mean that these places, UNCG, some of the other places, especially small liberal arts colleges that go through this process, can stay open. You know, and so as painful as the cuts are now, you’re extending the life of the college, you’re extending the life of the university. And that can be a good thing because you’re still serving students.
Jack Stripling So to the extent that this is sometimes a sheer financial calculation whether to keep a program or get rid of it, what are the consequences of colleges making those types of decisions? What’s the bigger picture here?
David Jesse The bigger picture is, you know, we’re not teaching students how to think. We’re not teaching students how to process. You know, you had a great conversation the other day with our colleague Beth [McMurtrie] about reading, right? And that matters whether you’re a business major or you’re a literature major. And so I think some of the consequences of these cuts are just a chipping away at some of those thinking skills, some of those processing skills that colleges and universities have generally been about. And that employer after employer and after employer says they want their employees to be able to do.
Jack Stripling So you and I have covered college leadership for a long time. We’ve both written a lot about presidents making tough decisions and coming under criticism. Look, you know, you would think that high paid administrators could make these decisions about what to keep and what not to. You would think faculty would have a voice in this process. What’s appealing to people in college leadership about using these consultants?
David Jesse It’s a shield. It’s a chance for them to say, hey, look at, I know this is a bad decision and you’re losing your job, but it’s objective. It had nothing to do with my feelings towards this. And so I think that’s what they’re looking for.
Jack Stripling And what about Rick Staisloff? What does he say about what he’s doing here and the value of it?
David Jesse He says that what he’s doing is teaching these colleges and universities how to ask these questions and how to best use their resources to fulfill their mission, which ultimately at all these places is to educate students.
Jack Stripling Do you think he’s abdicating some of his responsibility here when he talks about this stuff?
David Jesse Sure, right? Of course, he’s helping them make cuts, right? These consultants know exactly what they’re doing.
Jack Stripling So what’s next for the UNC system about this? Is it one and done with you and UNC-Greensboro, or is there more to come?
David Jesse There’s more to come. The system’s board of governors decided that every university in the system is going to go through this, which raises the broader point, like if, if you are on a college or a university campus anywhere across the United States, I would say if you haven’t already seen one of these consultants on your campus going through one of these reviews, it’s coming in the next couple years for you.
Jack Stripling So give me a little bit of an owner’s manual here, David. If I’m a faculty member and a consultant is coming to my campus, what does your reporting tell me that I should expect?
David Jesse You should expect for data to be pulled, to look at who’s taking what classes, who’s enrolling in what majors, and how is that changing? And then you should be prepared for a very robust discussion about what the values of the institution are. And is there room at a university for classes that maybe aren’t making money?
Jack Stripling So I should be prepared to be uncomfortable.
David Jesse You should be prepared to be uncomfortable. And I’m sorry to say this, but your basket weaving class may be on the chopping block.
Jack Stripling I was afraid you were going to say that. Well, David, this is fascinating reporting. I’m so glad you and Erin did it. It’s a really deep dive, inside look into how this process works. If people want to read it, they should go to chronicle.com and look for it. And just thank you so much for coming on the show and for your great reporting here.
David Jesse Yeah, thanks for having me.
Jack Stripling College Matters from the Chronicle is a production of The Chronicle of Higher Education, the nation’s leading independent newsroom covering colleges. If you liked the show, please leave us a review or invite a friend to listen. And remember to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts so that you never miss an episode. You can find an archive of every episode, all of our show notes, and much more at chronicle.com/collegematters. If you like, drop us a note at collegematters@chronicle.com. We are produced by Rococo Punch. Our podcast artwork is by Catrell Thomas. Special thanks to our colleagues Brock Read, Sarah Brown, Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez, Laura Krantz, Carmen Mendoza, Ron Coddington, Joshua Hatch, and all of the people at The Chronicle who make this show possible. I’m Jack Stripling. Thanks for listening.