McKinsey Arts and Sciences Report

The McKinsey Report was a document produced by the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company in summer 2011 which recommended changes to the administrative structure of Columbia University. The controversy over the report revolved around the plan to further integrate Columbia College and other schools into the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, led at the time by Executive Vice President of Arts and Sciences Nicholas Dirks. The report was popularized among the Columbia community after Moodygate, when former Columbia College Dean Michelle Moody-Adams suddenly announced on August 21, 2011 that she would be leaving her post in wake of concerns over transformations in "the administrative structure in Arts and Sciences." Before she resigned, Dean Moody-Adams warned that if the McKinsey report were implemented, it would "compromise the College’s academic quality and financial health."

The report was confidential, but the Columbia Daily Spectator was able to obtain a summary of it a few months later. On April 12, 2012, editors Sam Roth and Michele Cleary published an article about the report in The Eye. They also uploaded an executive summary of the McKinsey Report to Scribd.

Report Content

Revenue

As the summary makes clear, some of the main recommendations from the report aimed to increase revenue. The Spectator article states that "McKinsey’s report was commissioned in part to help administrators eliminate a budget deficit that has plagued A&S for the last few years."

No Loan Policy

The McKinsey Report recommended that Columbia's financial aid office consider bringing loans back into its official policy for assembling aid packages. Columbia eliminated loans in its package for families earning less than $50,000 a year beginning in the 2007-2008 academic year, and eliminated loans entirely the year after. The McKinsey report, in wake of the financial crisis of 2008, said that Columbia should think about reversing the policy.

External links

• McKinsey Report Summary