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The Universities of Wisconsin, a 13-institution system, paid Huron Consulting Group at least $51 million from 2019 to 2023, WORT reported.
The Madison radio station said it calculated the figure from open records requests it’s been receiving for a year. WORT said it heard Huron might have been advising the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh—which issued layoff notices for 140 employees in October 2023—and wanted to know what Huron was advising the UW System on and how much the system was paying. Faculty in other states have identified consulting companies such as Huron as harbingers of cuts.
WORT reported that the vast majority—$47 million—of what the UW System paid Huron for was “a contract for the rollout of a new system-wide workforce technology program called Workday.” Mark Pitsch, spokesperson for the UW System, didn’t confirm or deny the total $51 million figure Monday, but he did tell Inside Higher Ed in an email that “these expenditures are very transparent, and the bulk of them are associated with Workday.”
The system says Workday, a “cloud-based technology system” being implemented in July, will “standardize finance, human resources and research administration processes at every university—with the goal of refocusing staff time on our missions of teaching, research and outreach.” Workday describes itself as “The AI platform for HR and finance.”
Pitsch wrote that the UW System is a “multi-billion-dollar organization” whose universities “hire third parties for assistance in executing certain financial and operational projects that are typically outside the scope of day-to-day business.”
WORT noted it hasn’t received records from some institutions, including system flagship, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, so the contracts “tell an incomplete story.”
“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 reported.
