The haste of Elon Day’s fundraising is over. Now is an important time to reexamine what it means to be a university using our financial ties. It seems we haven’t talked about the consulting half of the picture.
The Elon-Queens merger also brought Elon University to consult with ethically dubious consulting firms, including the consulting firm that did infamous financial mapping used in a proposal to turn the bombed-out Gaza strip into a resort. Elon’s tax filings show multiple meetings with another firm that specializes in using student demographic data for “tuition leveraging.”
Direct ties to this sort of thinking poses questions for Elon’s calling as a university. Elon’s website claims the teaching “prepares graduates to be creative, resilient, ambitious and ethical citizens of our global culture.”
How can we claim the imagery of respecting humanity while doing business with those who don’t? There is a widening gap between image and reality. With each Elon Day, there is a sweat-stained man panting in a bathroom taking off a Phoenix full face mask. With each strange deal Elon makes with a dubious consulting firm, the goal of college steps closer to being a slogan.
Elon’s choice of problematic consulting groups for the Queens merger
Elon employed Boston Consulting Group to oversee the merger of the two universities, according to a statement by Elon. Boston Consulting Group is a major player in consulting. Consultants financially modelled the reconstruction of Gaza into a resort-like setting, according to The Financial Times. This specific branch of the group even offered “relocation packages” that gave $9,000 per Gaza resident. Boston Consulting Group said those employees were in a rogue branch in a public relations memo. Boston Consulting Group provided their financial modelling to The Tony Blair Group, who fashioned a “Gaza Riviera" project with a “Trump Riviera” and “Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone,” according to The Financial Times.
This is known in the consulting world, but the Elon-Queens merger gains another layer of territorial irony for students. For big consulting firms Boston Consulting Group, a successful business model involves branches acquiring clients at a rapid rate. It still doesn’t seem like a good idea for Elon’s consulting firm to work with an aid foundation that Doctors Without Borders describes as “slaughter masked as aid” because of the number of killings.
This is not a thread on X. It doesn’t matter what side of the spectrum you are on, or how you feel about Gaza. It seems unwise for a university to take direct advice from a company whose business culture leads to war opportunism. Boston Consulting Group helps with the financial modelling of authoritarian regimes of Saudi Arabia, according to The New York Times. Boston Consulting Group also profited off of the corrupt business practices of Isabel Dos Santos, daughter of Angola's authoritarian leader, for years, according to The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
Elon employed Huron Consulting Group for the due diligence of the merger. They are known for their massive layoffs in the colleges they consult with and breakneck efficiency. One report drew inspiration from the dispossession of Hurricane Katrina victims and applied it to education solutions during COVID-19, according to The Eagle.
Consulting with firms specializing in tuition pricing
Elon University consulted with Ruffalo Noel Levitz, a firm that specializes in “tuition leveraging” on multiple occasions, according to Elon’s non-profit filings in the fiscal endings of 2022 and 2023. These firms leverage mass amounts of student data to find families’ ability and willingness to pay in order to tuition efficiency.
Ruffalo Noel Levitz uses wide sets of sociological data to calculate the perfect amount of aid, need based or otherwise. These initial calculations are offered as bid to families, according to The New York Times.
Perhaps incidentally, Elon has been slow to update some scholarships despite tuition rising with inflation every year. College Fellows didn’t get a raise to their tuition until recently. Elon raised other scholarships, but the College Fellows scholarship has been the same $7,500 over the last four years. It wasn’t until this academic year that Elon raised the amount to $8,000. Now the students can afford five more $100 parking tickets.
If a student is a junior and a College Fellow now, they will have lost $6,832 across their college career because of unpredicted tuition raises. If they are a senior, the amount hovers around a similar $6,482. That is close to the annual scholarship amount.
As we look up and see the start of our adulthood, it is hard to see the goalpost stay still. Like wild and endless grass, it continues widening, continues to spill distant. We now see the nervous world, the cautious world, and every kind of inflation — the food at McEwen Dining Hall is really good though.
Elon is a business-savvy school with a beautiful campus. That is why we exist. Consulting is an important way to gain guidance through uncertainty. Concepts like tuition leveraging have their place. How long will we consult with these groups and wield the total imagery of a liberal arts university?
A university’s goals are informed with how it gets its advice. There is a classical picture of education that I sometimes hear older professors hearken back to. One of my professors referred to Elon University as the “Garden of Eden.” Maybe education has become a victim of the cynicism of our age, where every comfortable value seems unmasked by events on the edges of the world.
When you minimize the moral goal of education you become like the nearby High Point University. They barely use liberal arts language to cover up their goal. High Point is an example of a university that runs like a business on every level. In a way, it is honest.
I remember touring the campus during the last days of COVID-19 pandemic. I completed a tour by golf cart as I saw the purple-doused networking steakhouses and the fake airplane seating that simulates answering work emails.
My tour guide ushered me into a room into a meeting room. It is where they close the deal and make the kill, a more one-on-one method learned from sales. The saleswoman-type had an entrepreneurial distance in her face as she passed out High Point University literature and spoke to me. The pamphlets encouraged vague life skills and business leadership. I took the pamphlets politely and stumbled into the sun.
Gates and fences surround the university and confine its fountains and strange statues from town. I already made up my mind to throw away the pamphlets before I got to the car. I wonder how many kids have been Elon and done the same. They are wrong now, but maybe in 10 years they won’t be.