$51 million dollars. That’s how much money the UW System paid Chicago-based Huron Consulting Group between 2019 and 2023.
Neil Kraus says that number is “astronomical.” Kraus is a professor of political science at UW-River Falls and President of United Falcons, the campus branch of AFT-Wisconsin. He tracks the Universities of Wisconsin budget cuts, technology spending, and austerity measures.
He co-wrote a piece with Jon Shelton for the Cap Times about technology spending.
“I cited a number, just on one software–EAB’s Navigate–which is a huge priority for the UW, [that was] over $20 million. And I thought that was a lot. It is a lot. So your number is astronomical and game changing. Wow,” Kraus says.
But first let me backup and describe how WORT learned about Huron’s contracts with the UW System.
In October 2023, the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh laid off 140 employees as part of their “Institutional Realignment Plan.” WORT got wind that the school may have been advised by Huron, a company with a history of what some have called “austerity-based recommendations” to higher education administrations including at the New School, West Virginia University, and the University of Wisconsin.
Huron has done work for the UW System since at least 2011 when they were hired by UW-Madison to perform an “efficiency study” that was projected to cost $3 million dollars.
WORT wanted to understand what Huron was advising the UW System on and how much they were being paid for it. So we filed open records requests with UW System Administration and all System campuses. We asked for contracts they had with Huron.
The responses came in dribbles over the course of a year. Several schools, including UW–Madison, have not fulfilled our requests. The UW System only provided contracts between 2019 and 2023, saying that the time period we initially requested from 2011 to 2023 would be too costly to turn over.
From the records we were given, we learned that the UW System holds several multi-year contracts with Huron that total over $51 million dollars. That includes a contract for the rollout of a new system-wide workforce technology program called Workday that cost over $47 million.
But Huron has provided other services. At UW-La Crosse, Huron was contracted for over thirteen-hundred hours of work to resolve a PeopleSoft error in which 400 students were erroneously issued refunds to their student accounts. That work cost the UW System $258,000 dollars.
Another contract shows that Huron designed and facilitated a workshop for “institutional realignment” at UW-Oshkosh in August 2023, just months before the layoffs. That workshop cost $24,000.
The $51 million spent by the UW System between 2019 and 2023 on contracts with Huron is almost three times as much as the $18 million budget shortfall that triggered the Oshkosh layoffs in 2023.
Only two schools–Milwaukee and River Falls–responded directly to our records requests. UW-Milwaukee provided documentation that the school spent over $900,000 in one year alone on contracts with Huron. At UW-River Falls, Huron was contracted for $84,050 to provide “maintenance activities” in 2021. Consultants were paid $275 and $310 per hour. The UW System redacted these hourly rates from the documents they sent us.
Click here to view WORT’s records requests.
Kraus, who teaches at UW-River Falls, is concerned that the UW System is ceding control to corporate interests.
“The UW System values corporate interests over the interest of education and our students and our community. Just as a frame of reference, at UW-River Falls, and across the UW System, we are being told to cut several-hundred thousand, a million, two million [dollars]. And that trickles down to the department and college level. You have to begin, basically cutting sections, and we start with part-time faculty who get paid about $4,000 per course. I’d have to get out my calculator to begin to even wrap my mind around how many courses, how many students could be served by a number like $51 million. It’s staggering,” says Kraus.
Allie Bovis, a spokesperson for Huron, declined to be recorded but defended the costs. Bovis told WORT that technology implementation is expensive but leads to cost savings over time.
WORT reached out to the Mark Pitsch, the UW System spokesperson, but he did not respond to our multiple requests for comment.
Jon Shelton is professor at UW-Green Bay, where he teaches democracy and justice studies. He’s also president of UWGB-United, the union for faculty and academic staff at Green Bay, and vice president of higher education for AFT-Wisconsin.
He says that spending on consultants is directly connected to the budget cuts across the System.
“There were two series of budget cuts during the Walker years that were pretty bad for the UW System. First around the time of Act 10. Then in 2015, Act 55, which Walker called the Act 10 for the UW System, where $250 million was cut from the UW at the same time as the Bucks arena got about the same amount in subsidies. Tenure and shared governance were taken out of state statues. The actual language that that law used for campus chancellors was calling them CEOs. There was a very conscious signaling from the legislature that they wanted campus chancellors to run universities more like businesses. And also in the context of a time when we were seeing a decrease in state support. I think a lot of campus administrators started to view things like: ‘No matter how much money the state has, we’re never going to get public money again. So the best way for us to think about how we operate our campuses is to think about our students as customers and maximize revenue generation at every firm.’ There are consulting firms that do that for businesses. I think it’s deeply problematic, because our institutions aren’t businesses,” says Shelton.
Shelton agrees that the $51 million dollars is astounding. And in light of the budget cuts, the lowest-paid people at campus schools are being hurt.
“You think about how the lowest paid people on our campuses have suffered from these budget cuts. It’s not the full professor at Madison who has suffered from these budget cuts. It’s, like on my campus, the admin assistant who works their butt off and can’t get a raise. It’s the adjunct instructors who, on my campus, make less than $4,000 per course for a three credit course. That pay doesn’t go up. What would those people cost? Certainly way less than what these consultants are charging,” says Shelton.
The budget cuts are also hurting students, says Shelton. And the $84 thousand River Falls spent on Huron could have gone to teaching faculty or student services.
“It’s pretty close to a faculty line for a year. And it’s definitely enough for an office support person, an academic advisor even with good benefits. That’s literally what’s being sacrificed here: a position where students could have their needs met better on campus, instead it’s going to a very high-paid consulting firm,” says Shelton.
UW schools have been in a tough spot for some time. A 2020 analysis from the Wisconsin Policy Forum found that the UW System faced a flash flood of financial challenges brought on by stagnant state funding and declining enrollment.
Funding for the UW System was one of the biggest partisan battles in 2023. And the UW System is expected to ask the state Legislature for $855 million in the upcoming budget, reports the Green Bay Press Gazette.
Shelton says UW leaders–especially chancellors–could advocate for more state funding.
“These people should be the biggest champions for public funding that exist in our state. They should be the ones saying, ‘We have a historic budget surplus, we have to fund the UW System.’ But they don’t do that. Almost to a person, at least publicly, accept it. ‘Well we just aren’t going to get more resources from the legislature. The best thing we can do is hire consultants to figure out how we can reshape things on our campuses.’ In my view, it all ends up short-changing our students,” says Shelton.
Ultimately, the contracts that WORT received tell an incomplete story. We only received a portion of the documents we requested. We also learned that there is no central repository for these contracts, meaning the UW System may not even be aware of all the contracts held by individual campuses. It’s likely that no one in the UW System is monitoring how much is being spent on consulting firms like Huron.
Featured image by Phil Roeder via Flickr.
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