When Holden Thorp, the chancellor of the University of North Carolina, was looking for ways to cut the university’s budget, he did what many executives in private industry do  hired a management consultant.

The consultant, Bain & Company, came up with recommendations that it said could save the university more than $150 million a year. They included centralizing some of the university’s widely dispersed procurement operations (up to $45 million) and information technology functions (up to $19 million) and simplifying its organizational structure (up to $12 million).

And since Mr. Thorp hired Bain, both Cornell University and the University of California, Berkeley, have followed suit. In each case, the management consultants examined business functions but stayed away from academic issues like courseloads and tenure.

“Like any other large organization,” Mr. Thorp said, “we hire people, we buy stuff, we connect to the Internet, we build buildings and take care of our property, and we wanted Bain to look at how we could carry out those functions as efficiently as possible.”