Management consultants and university futures: Academic capitalism and the capture of UK public higher education

Abstract

IMPACT STATEMENT: This article shows how management consultancy firms, particularly the Big Four, leveraged their position to become key brokers in English higher education, expanding their influence across multiple areas of governance and management. Aided by legislative changes designed to promote competition and enable for-profit providers to capture the rents provided by public higher education, these firms promote forms of marketization and privatization that are radically re-purposing the mission of the public university. Unbundling and financialization of university assets is central to that project. The article reveals how consultancy firms used the Covid 19 crisis not only to increase their influence but, through a series of ‘crisis narrative’ reports, to advocate strategies for fundamentally altering the entire public university system, locking in permanent changes and structures of managerialism that are anathema to the principles of public higher education. The article is a warning to policy-makers to beware the free-market fantasies and self-serving scenarios that these consultancy firms advocate. This article examines the extraordinary growth of private management consultancy involvement in UK higher education. Analysing a series of ‘thought-leadership’ reports on university futures published between 2012 and 2023 it examines how these firms have embedded themselves in universities and cemented their expertise, profitability and power. Examining the future scenarios they imagine, the author suggests that these reports reflect a new phase in the evolution of academic capitalism, one characterised by consultancy-driven strategies for market-making and unbundling. Finally, the author asks, what are the implications of these interventions for the future of public higher education?.