Building, not billing: What the university cuts reveal about ethical consulting

Earlier this year, a Four Corners investigationput a figure to something the higher education sector had felt for a long time. Australia’s universities spent roughly $1.8 billion on external consultants in a single year, even as they cut thousands of academic and professional staff. Reported as a story about waste, it was really a story about purpose. Because the question worth asking isn’t how much universities spent on consultants. It’s what the consulting was for.

I have spent years on both sides of that question. Before consulting, I spent the better part of a decade as a senior leader inside one of Australia’s leading universities, responsible for more than two hundred staff, a budget in the tens of millions and a major research facility I helped take from business case to opening day. I have been the client who signs the consulting contract, and now I'm the consultant who asks to be trusted with one. From that vantage, the university story isn’t really about universities at all. It’s about what any of us should expect from the advice we pay for.

This story isn’t about consultants. It’s about incentives.

The easy version casts consultants as villains and universities as victims, or the other way around. The harder version is about incentives, and about whose interests a piece of advice is built to serve.

Consider how the worst of it works. A firm is engaged to find savings, and the savings it finds happen to justify the engagement. A short contract becomes a long one, then a permanent fixture, because every problem it identifies is one only the firm can solve. The advice arrives pre-aligned to a conclusion someone wanted before the work began. None of this requires bad people. It only requires a model in which the consultant’s reward and the client’s interest quietly drift apart.

The investigation pointed to something more structural too. At a majority of the universities examined by Four Corners, people sitting on governing councils held senior roles at the very consulting firms the sector was paying. When the people advising on the cuts, the people governing the institution and the people billing for the work are drawn from the same small circle, independence stops being a given. It becomes something you have to prove.

Good advice sometimes ends the engagement

The first duty of an ethical adviser is candour, even when candour is expensive. The most valuable thing a consultant can say is often the thing that shortens the contract: you don’t need us for this, your own people can do it, the answer you’re hoping I’ll endorse is the wrong one. Advice that only ever recommends more advice should be read for what it is.

This is harder than it sounds, because the pressure runs the other way. There is always a reason to extend, to widen scope, to find the next workstream. Resisting that pull isn’t a courtesy. It’s the whole job.

Build capability, don’t manufacture dependency

There are two ways to leave a client. One is with a folder of slides and a renewal invoice. The other is with a team that no longer needs you. Ethical consulting is unambiguous about which it aims for.

In my university years, the external help that mattered most was the help that made my own people better: sharper at the analysis, more confident in the decision, able to do the next hard thing without picking up the phone. The help that mattered least looked impressive and left nothing behind. The difference wasn’t intelligence or polish. It was intent.

This is also why so many university restructures have gone so badly. A restructure run as a spreadsheet exercise, done to people rather than with them, will hit its savings target and miss the things that made the institution worth saving: morale, institutional memory and the social licence that lets change hold. Cutting a public health degree or an English literature program delivers the savings in one budget cycle; rebuilding that capability takes years.

Whose definition of success?

Every engagement runs on someone’s definition of success, and the ethics live in whose. When success is a cost-reduction target lifted out of context, the advice optimises for the spreadsheet and the institution pays later. When success is the client’s actual mission (in a university, that means students taught well and impactful research that engages), the same financial pressures produce very different advice.

That is the test I would put to any firm, including my own. Not ‘what did you recommend’, but ‘whose success were you serving when you recommended it’.

The authentic alternative: ethics as a discipline not a disclaimer

None of this is new, and the better part of the profession has been saying it for years. The Commonwealth Procurement Rules now make ethical conduct part of how value for money is judged, and the scrutiny that followed the consulting scandals of recent years has only sharpened the expectation. But rules set a floor. The firms worth trusting live their ethics rather than advertise them: independence they can demonstrate, advice they will stand behind, capability they leave in the building.

At Parbery, we call that the authentic alternative. It’s a plain idea, really: we work alongside your team, on the understanding that the highest authority on your business is you, and our measure of success is yours.

The university story will keep unfolding, and there is plenty more to say about funding, governance and the pressures the sector is under. But for anyone who buys advice, whether a vice-chancellor, a department secretary or a board, the question underneath all of it stays the same. Did the advice leave you stronger, or did it leave you needing more advice? Because good consulting was never measured by what it billed. It’s measured by what it builds.