Universities’ $1.8 billion spend on consultants and contractors shocks experts and politicians
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-30/university-consultants-fees-uts-kpmg-four-corners/106499192
Universities’ $1.8 billion spend on consultants and contractors shocks experts and politicians
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-30/university-consultants-fees-uts-kpmg-four-corners/106499192
14 Comments
Is this a shock to anyone who is not an expert or a politician?
Universities funnelling millions of dollars from Australian kids and overseas students into their mates pockets, whilst firing lecturers to employ ai bots and they were shocked?
Now do the VPS.
That does make a lot of sense, I went to Griffith about 10-15 years ago it was very hard to justify 12k upfront and 28k on the HECS debt each year when the classes felt less funded than highschool
It’d just be 15-20 people sitting on Imacs in a computer room while a 30 year old Norwegian dude taught us from memory lol
He was cool but maybe not $700 a week cool
As long as this excludes universities subcontracting other universities when they themselves are hired as consultants (which is common) this is pretty shocking.
There needs to be a massive overhaul of the university system.
Shut down most of them.
The for profit model banking on international students is just lowering the standards of education.
Make university free, make it limited.
End the international student visa pathway rort.
Not everything requires a degree and we shouldn’t be forcing young people to go into debt in order to gain employment.
I remember when I was at university 10 years ago it was bad with international students being allowed to skate through on things that would have resulted in a fail mark for an Australian.
I know people who work at two different universities and it’s much worse now.
AI submitted gibberish is rampant. Especially in ICT and engineering degrees.
>Universities Australia chief executive Luke Sheehy says these institutions are large, complex workplaces.
>”We need to make sure we’ve got expert advice on how those buildings adhere to occupational health and safety arrangements, that our IT capability is cybersecurity safe,” he said.
I’m sorry, please correct me if I’m wrong but wouldn’t one of the best places to receive expert advice be…a university?
Not a surprise to anyone who has stepped foot in a university classroom in the last 10-15 years.
Having to spend big on consultancy is the direct result of universities (and companies, and the public service) refusing to actually invest in permanent staff, or bother to train or retain them. This is because the work those staff could do doesn’t just disappear when you refuse to invest in staff; you just pay a premium for outsourcing it. In the case of universities, I’d be surprised if many of their contractors aren’t also sham contractors.
The entire University sector is an utter mess. They’ve become far too focussed on profit over everything else, to the point where higher education has become overpriced and poorly delivered. Many have also made the prospect of studying unattractive to young people, because campus life has been destroyed by unaffordable on-campus living and insistence on delivering classes as pre-recorded, sometimes years-old online slop as the norm. It’s little wonder so many young people are choosing not to study. Why would anyone want to spend an absolutely eye-watering sum to gain shitty qualifications? Some courses have got so bad students practically have to self-teach, and many courses assess by just dumping students into group assignments, fully aware one or two students will probably have to carry the whole project.
This is going to be a huge crisis for universities in coming years, because they’re about to hit the demographic cliff. Their pool of students will keep falling, and if they take on too many international students, so will their rankings. If universities turned their minds to preservation or longevity, instead of how to max out profits in the short term, they’d focus on becoming places young people want to be, and young people can *afford* to be, and they’d push for reforms like free domestic tertiary education (the majority of the OECD already has free or very cheap domestic university places for most students). We are one of the most expensive countries in the world for tertiary study, and we will absolutely pay the price in lost innovation and productivity.
> At the time, Professor Dewar was a partner with the consultancy firm KordaMentha. Two days after his appointment was announced, KordaMentha was invited by the university’s tender panel to submit a tender for a project to run a review of the University of Wollongong’s operations.
>The firm won the tender and secured around $3.8 million in work from the university.
>During his eight-month term as interim vice-chancellor, Professor Dewar was given one day off a fortnight to work unpaid for KordaMentha to “provide leadership to a team of consultants in the Higher Education practice” of the university.
>Professor Dewar was paid $1 million per annum by the University of Wollongong, while doing a nine-day fortnight.
That is insane
I work in higher ed. There are some very legitimate uses for consultants. These include requirements for external reviews/audits to comply with legislative obligations, and using them for cybersecurity purposes is probably legitimate too.
Using them as management consultants to discuss staff redundancies etc. is in my view not a very valid use. It’s just university leadership outsourcing their responsibilities to an external consultant. That way they’ll feel less guilty about sacking staff because a consultant said they needed to.
Also, a lot of the big consultancy firms do a shithouse job. They don’t understand the sector, they don’t understand the legislation and the reports are usually written by junior staff who have no idea how universities operate. I’ve seen some of their reviews/audits and they are clueless.
> “Why don’t they get the experts in the faculty to consult instead.”
Because a lot of the work is grunt work performed by analysts crunching the numbers. The faculty are usually already close to capacity in their teaching and research to be available to do this work. They also might not be “game-fit” in terms of their ability to do the work, as they won’t have the recent exposure to other clients from various industries, having worked in a single institution for several years. There is also a potential conflict of interest where an academic might be asked to consult on the viability of their own job, or that of their colleagues.
> Why are there so many consultants on university councils?
I guarantee a significant portion of these are part of there to chair the Audit and Risk Committee. Finding someone with those skills who isn’t a consultant at a large accounting firm is like trying to find an experienced chef who hasn’t worked in a restaurant. Also, much of the makeup of university councils is determined by the government, so if the government is shocked at that, they need to look in the mirror.
One final thing, only a fraction of that spend (applied across the entire sector to generate a big number for the headline) is spent on “management consulting.” Much of it is spent on more specialised consultants (e.g. construction industry consultants with good insurance) or is spent on bringing people into a research project.
I don’t like management consultants either, but there’s quite a bit of hyperbole in this article.
Shocks politicians? This is standard practise. The Victorian government is just a consultant playground.
Hey that’s me, sort of, I consult to other sectors too.
Four Uni’s, either on student/revenue growth or digital tech to reduce risk or for student/revenue growth.
I wasn’t surprised that ex mgmt consultants were running the business-side at many levels but I was surprised how effectively they had sidelined the ‘Academics’ from power. The ancient Greeks would be outraged.
I was once hired to review three other consultancy’s slide decks and simplify the recommended actions from the bullshit corpo speak. On one deck I found multiple instances of another Uni’s name on it. Quality copy pasting work there Lou.
Shorter learning cycles, fast changing economy, AI, are making some ‘knowledge work’ qualifications irrelevant by the time a student graduates.
I’d only recommend Uni for slow changing professions or for the humanities because that’s more valuable than we realise.