I could see the point of consulting if what you were paying for was genuine expertise that you lack in house, but often consultants are just know-nothings fresh out of university.
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.
A million spent on consulting is a million worth of written proof of how seriously they are taking the problem. And it's even quantifiable! ("million"), yay! As a convenient side effect, it makes the problem you have just proven to be in your focus appear more important, what's not to like. In the end the consultants are basically paid to send a bill.
When you hire a consultant as a public university for a contract over a certain amount of money, you need to put out a request for proposals and evaluate consultant proposals.
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.
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.