Is consulting the ultimate late capitalism grift?
Paying $X million for an outside consultancy to come up with the decision, gives the decision authority. Of course, the consultancy is usually guided to the 'right' decision, either implicitly or explicitly. Although sometimes you see failures of guidance, where against incentives the consultancy delivers a good recommendation and then it's usually ignored.
Anyway, this is a grift, but who's going to turn down $1M to tell someone what they already know?
IMHO, the more grifty consultancy is systems building, where you set up a $10M contract over ten years to build a system that doesn't work and doesn't actually replace the old system. But maybe that's just performative too: nobody wants to say to just keep the old system, so spending time and money on something everyone knows won't work and won't be ready before you leave makes it look like you're doing the right thing?
There's also non-grift consulting. You might pay a real expert a reasonable sum for an engineering consult, etc.
You pay the consulting firm ~ 1 million, they confirm what you already know, "these 32 programs are costing the University 10 million or whatever a year with few enrollments. The only logical thing to do is to close those programs and reallocate those funds." You, as the president, hide behind a report from an independent third party but still get to make the correct but unpopular opinion to cut bloat.
So another layer to the consultancy grift is consulting agencies who scam and delude the consultants themselves. Consultants are often just glorified temps who end up doing same sort of of grunt work as employees, but have much less job security and therefore potential to unionise. Big companies like a workforce that can't organise, and pay consulting agencies this for precariousness as a service.
As part of that, they can put in requirements for consultant staff, require proposals show time allotment for staff and tie billing to hours actually put in.
So if you hired a consultant and got nothing but fresh out of university know nothings its because you did it on purpose, or you are inept both at writing RFPs and also evaluating proposals, and maybe at managing consultants as well.
That being said, most of the time, outside of a few cases where the expertise is hard to find anywhere and you literally cannot find it outside of consultants, I'm of the opinion that the money spent on consultants would be better spent building that specialty knowledge in house.
1. We can't afford the expert we need forever so we consult temporarily. Like major IT infrastructure. Colleges and universities tend to not attract the massively high quality tech workers that private industry does.
2. We know what is wrong, but internal politics or external politics keep us from saying and doing things we need to do. In this instance, consultants come in to tell us what we already know, but lets managers avoid responsibility for damaging relationships/politics.
3. We got a grant. Let's spend it on consultants because the prof that wrote it left last semester and his "notes" are like the necronomicon.
I usually work with number 2 when I consult (there is a Midwest school that still refers to me as the grim reaper because of all the firings that happened after I completed my findings report). But I would argue that number 1 is more common, in my experience.
4. We need plausible deniability in case something goes really wrong with the choices we've made so let's hire consultants to validate our decisions.
McKinsey always wins.