So, you may have seen on the weekend that the Alberta Government decided to award a $3.7 million contract to McKinsey & Company to conduct a review of the province’s post-secondary system.

I have thoughts.

The details of the contract are unavailable, but you can see the initial request for proposals here.  It’s actually a pretty cool set of research projects that might produce some interesting data.  I mean, admittedly they are things you’d expect your public service to mostly have at their fingertips (and Alberta’s public service is pretty good, so my guess is in part this contract is a signal that the UCP government does not trust its own public service to do such work.)

Now, I did not bid on this contract.  Not because I couldn’t have put together a great team to do it, but because a) it was pretty clear at the outset that the Alberta wanted one of the Big Five consulting groups to do it and b) the RFP came out not long after I made some comments about Alberta’s Performance-Based Funding scheme, which I hear were not warmly received, and this was such a political contract that anything with my name on it was unlikely to get past the first hurdle.  But I did take a pretty good look at what they wanted to do and made a brief estimate at costing.  It ain’t $3.7 million.

The main outputs of the project are to be a minimum of ten issue papers (with a possibility of up to five more – see page 9 of the RFP) as well as a final report with recommendations.  They are each meaty topics – analysis of ways to improve learner access to skills and training, identification of ways to remove red tape for both institutions and learners, analysis of the changing nature of work, etc.  But you know what, if you’ve got one good team of 5-8 people with deep expertise in higher education working non-stop on each of these, you can do a perfectly serviceable paper on each of these for, on average, less than $100,000.  Maybe another $100K for the main report – $200K if you want fancy Deloitte-like graphics.  That’s about a third of what they are paying McKinsey.  I would love to see where they are spending the extra $2.5 million. 

The fact is McKinsey has no particularly strong record looking at higher education systems.   I well recall being called in by a major international institution to review some work McKinsey had done for a mid-sized Asian country desiring to grow its private higher education sector in the early 2010s.   The report was divided into two sections – one for the domestic market and one for the foreign market – and hilariously the two sections contained diametrically-opposed conclusions.  The one on the foreign market emphasized the need for high quality and strong quality assurance (otherwise how could private institutions attract foreign students), while the one on the domestic market recommended fewer QA processes (else how could private institutions compete with public ones).  It was as if no one had bothered to check whether the two sets of recommendations were coherent– and, frankly, even in the some of the places where it was coherent, it bordered on charlatanry.

But forget McKinsey for a second: any of the Big Five would have some of the same problems.  All of them like to talk about things like “the University of the Future”, as if universities all shared the same DNA or had the same purposes.  This one-size-fits-allness might work in the private sector, and it might even work for individual institutions, which can specify which best practices they care about, but this approach poorly matches systems-level analysis because in higher education systems, different institutions have different roles to play and therefore, to use some industry speak, have heterogenous utility-maximization formulas.  I’ve noticed this in particular around Ernst & Young’s work in India, but it’s a general industry problem. 

The final point here is that any of the Big Five are ill-suited for one very specific portion of this project, which is the one that requires the successful proponent to facilitate “endorsement and support of…the Strategy by key stakeholders signaling commitment to shared implementation”.  There should be no doubt at the end of the day institutions will show up to endorse whatever strategy the government wants to impose because, hey, people will say anything with a gun to their head.   But actual commitment?  Based on a shared vision?  That takes some deep engagement with stakeholders.  A genuine institutional consensus may in fact push back– in some respects at least – against what the government of the day may want to impose (and in this case the push-back is definitely going to be on basic research, which from my reading of the RFP has essentially no place in the government’s plans).  Would any Big Five consulting firm report that?  Unlikely. They are more comfortable with pronouncing “best practices” from on high and telling the plebs to get on with it than they are in genuinely engaging in discussions with autonomous institutions.  That’s just the nature of the beast.

(And that’s before we get into the fact that the government is vastly overpaying McKinsey for a report which, among other things, will be about telling institutions to spend less money. This will drive many stakeholders bananas.  Pro tip for the Alberta government: if you’re going to commission a report on efficiency, don’t hire the Rolls-Royce consultants).

The only thing I can think of as a plus on this appointment is that even McKinsey should be able to tell the Alberta government that its policy of controlling total institutional expenditures – that is, in effect, telling institutions to be entrepreneurial but at the same time punishing them for spending any money they obtain by clawing back their public grant – is the exact opposite of a best practice, unheard of in any jurisdiction that I am aware of.   

But then again, even if McKinsey sees it, will they say anything?  Speaking truth to power is not their specialty.