In 2025, the size of the global executive search market will likely exceed $58 billion, and by 2030 it could approach $95 billion. This year, the United States is estimated to account for about $10.3 billion of that market. Korn Ferry, the largest firm in the market, reported total revenues of nearly $2.8 billion last year, with over one-third attributed to executive searches.
Searches for college and university presidents are only a portion of the industry. With nearly four thousand degree-granting colleges and universities, a conservative estimate of annual search firm fees—assuming an average turnover rate of between six and seven years and average fees of between $100,000 and $150,000—is between $55 million and $100 million.
Our research shows that the use of search firms to hire college and university presidents has grown substantially in recent decades. In 1975, only a few private colleges and universities hired search firms for assistance in finding a new president. By 2015, nearly all presidential searches included an executive search firm. Approximately fifty top search firms specialize in higher education, but only fourteen are members of the American Council on Education (ACE) Roundtable of Executive Search Firms, which focuses on presidential and chancellor searches.
Search firms play a central role in shaping the future of higher education. In doing so, they have contributed to the erosion of shared governance by marginalizing the faculty’s voice in defining and selecting leadership, created threats to academic freedom, diminished transparency, and corporatized the university.
The Shifting Presidency
A recent ACE/TIAA report, The Changing College President, Aligning Experience with Necessity, begins, “Over the past 30 years, there has been a significant transformation in the responsibilities of college and university presidents. Their roles have grown to encompass a broader range of resource-development duties—including significant fundraising, state representative meetings, town-gown relations, and many external-facing responsibilities—and their professional backgrounds reflect this shift.” During this same period, we have witnessed a similar change in the search process. In one of our studies, we cataloged advertisements for college and university presidents, both public and private, published in The Chronicle of Higher Education over a forty-year period—from 1975 to 2015.
In 1975, fewer than 2 percent of advertisements, all from private colleges and universities, mostly church-related, mentioned a search firm. In 1995, nearly 27 percent of these ads listed a search firm as the primary point of contact, with the majority still being private institutions. By 2015, the last year we cataloged, these firms assisted in at least 92 percent of advertised presidential searches, with no difference between public and private institutions.
The greatest responsibility of a governing board is to hire a president. In the past, presidents typically had climbed the academic administration ladder, simplifying the task of identifying a new president. Back then, board members turned to faculty as primary partners in the presidential search. However, much has changed since those “good old days.”
What contributed to this change? Certainly, the evolving roles and responsibilities of college and university presidents are factors. However, simply climbing the academic administrative ladder—from department chair to dean, to provost, and finally to president—is no longer the main qualification. In fact, such a trajectory may not always be necessary or ideal. But this shift alone does not explain the widespread reliance on executive search firms in presidential hiring.
A more likely factor is the changing role of trustees and the individuals who serve on these boards. Previously, they were part-time stewards who visited campus occasionally, offered advice, and approved the appointment of a new president. Today’s trustees are involved in nearly every aspect of institutional life, overseeing not only budgets and physical assets but also financial risk, enterprise strategy, personnel and leadership succession, academic programs, and crisis management. In this environment, trustees see themselves as true fiduciaries, responsible for the long-term health and competitiveness of their institutions.
In addition to these changes in roles and responsibilities, the composition of college and university governing boards has shifted. In the past, board members have had connections to the institution and the community—a local banker, an insurance broker, distinguished alums, a well-known attorney, and others. Today, it is not uncommon to encounter board members with few, if any, ties to the institutions—senior corporate and nonprofit executives, wealth managers, think-tank leaders, political allies, and other nationally prominent individuals of distinction or wealth. Some may not even reside in the region.
These individuals often have less time to devote to the increased responsibilities of trustees and are accustomed to having staff support. For the corporate executives on the board, search firms are ubiquitous— they wouldn’t think of not utilizing one in their own business.
With presidential turnover increasing, boards now face greater competition than ever when seeking a new president. Search firms assert they have the expertise and experience to offer boards a competitive advantage. As one search firm CEO stated, “Presidential searches are tremendously complex and take more time because there are so many stakeholder groups to involve and to satisfy.” Thus, board members are led to believe that they won’t be able to identify, let alone hire, the best possible candidate without a search consultant.
Inside the Black Box
We’ve been interviewed by dozens of reporters, primarily about presidential contracts and compensation. In 2014, a reporter from the Dayton Daily News asked if we had examined how presidents are hired—specifically, whether we had seen a search firm contract that she had obtained. We replied “no” and asked that she share the contract with us. The contract was for a presidential search at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. The contents amazed us.
After reading that one contract, we determined to study search firm agreements. We reported our findings at the AAUP’s 2016 annual meeting. Later, we published a series of three articles in The Chronicle of Higher Education based on that study, which drew on our analysis of sixty-one contracts. The reception of our work, both at the meeting and in the media, was surprising and overwhelming. The key findings are as follows.
- There are two major types of search firm contracts. Contingency-based contracts assess a fee calculated as a percentage of the president’s first-year compensation, including base salary, any bonuses tied to the first year of employment, and (potentially) anticipated deferred compensation that is earned but not yet paid for the first year. Retained contracts assess a fixed fee. Fees for both contingency-based and retained contracts are often equal to about one-third of the candidate’s anticipated first-year compensation. Both types of contracts also include reimbursements for expenses and fees for extra services not in the original contract, and they generally add an administrative fee of 10 to 15 percent of the base fee.
- The firms essentially require full payment up front—33 percent upon signing, 33 percent in thirty days, and the remainder thirty days thereafter. Few, if any, searches are completed within sixty days of signing a contract.
- Most contracts are drafted by the search firm, typically on the company’s letterhead. The terms usually favor the search firm.
- According to the contracts, there are few requirements for search firms to conduct due diligence. The most common requirement is to perform reference checks with individuals named by the candidate. This requirement appeared in only 51 percent of the contracts collected for the study. Some contracts indicated that they would conduct more thorough background checks, but only by searching “publicly available sources” or by hiring a third party to complete the work—usually not guaranteed.
We attempted to replicate that study in 2020. While there is no doubt that the pandemic contributed to our inability to finish the second study, we also identified several other factors. First, we found that some institutions now have master agreements with search firms that enable them to issue a purchase order against a standard, albeit very generic, contract. Second, some search firms have maintained that they “own” all data related to the searches and, as private entities, are not required to respond to public records requests. They assert that their proposals and agreements contain proprietary information, the release of which would be detrimental to their businesses. Finally, some institutions completely circumvent the entire public procurement process by using their university foundations.
We still receive and study search firm agreements, most often shared with us by local journalists. In these, we’ve noted two new trends over the past decade. The first is a dramatic increase in what one search firm executive calls confidential searches. As one executive has stated, “In a confidential search, only the final selected candidate is officially announced. In contrast, all applicants may be subject to public disclosure in a public search—though this disclosure can occur at various stages, from the initial application to the final selection process.”
Search firms use various methods to ensure confidentiality. The most common is requiring all search committee members to sign strict nondisclosure agreements (NDAs). These often last indefinitely and may impose severe penalties, ranging from loss of tenure to criminal prosecution. Another way they protect candidates’ confidentiality is by conducting all interviews in secret—we know of instances in which candidates arrived on campus in SUVs with blacked-out windows and entered through a loading dock guarded by campus police. One search firm provides candidates’ materials on a tablet during meetings so committee members cannot duplicate or share the materials. Other firms send materials in advance but implement security measures that prevent files from being copied or printed. And, at one university, we found that the search committee never met and no one knew the names of other search committee members. The university stated that this was to ensure that a president was not hired through “groupthink.”
Given the extreme nature of these measures, we have abandoned the term “confidential” and refer to these as “secret searches.” Search firms justify this secrecy in various ways. The ACE/TIAA report presents the following rationales:
- Secret searches are necessary “to mitigate the potentially negative effects on the institutions looking for new presidents as well as on the candidates—primarily those who held presidential positions elsewhere.”
- “Donors . . . have rescinded committed donations upon learning of a president’s interest in another position.”
- “Public searches also pose equity challenges, including superficial judgments and biased assessments based on initial impressions.”
What each of these purported justifications shares is that a secret search prioritizes the interests of candidates and search firms over those of the institutions.
The second emerging trend is the use of “listening sessions” to replace traditional needs assessments. Search consultants use these sessions to shape the presidential profile and develop a prospectus for the position. Typically, listening sessions are conducted as town halls, open forums, or targeted focus groups. Sessions also may be recorded and shared with candidates as an alternative to campus visits.
Results of listening sessions should be approached with a degree of skepticism. Facilitator bias is the most evident reason to be cautious, as it poses the greatest threat to the validity of focus group research. It can manifest through leading questions that contribute to confirmation bias. There are also more subtle forms of bias, such as response ordering and time management. Any of these biases can lead search firms to influence candidate interactions with the search committee, steering the committee in a specific direction, either subtly or overtly.
Our review of proposals from search firms revealed one last “dirty little secret” of how these firms operate. All of the firms boast about their ability to generate a pool of highly qualified candidates. But how do they achieve this? We’ve identified six methods. The most obvious is through advertising, typically in The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed. The search firm will create the advertisement, although the institution covers the placement costs.
Other methods include asking campus community members to suggest candidates, accepting nominations, inviting individuals who were nominated but chose not to apply to recommend other possibly interested individuals, and recycling candidates from the search firm’s “Rolodex” of unsuccessful candidates from previous searches. Search firms occasionally make cold calls to potential candidates.
While search firms tout their ability to deliver exceptional candidates, many utilize methods that lack both innovation and rigor. The majority of candidates are sourced through passive strategies, such as advertising, internal referrals, and use of previously evaluated applicants, rather than through proactive recruitment or a wide-ranging outreach approach. This reality challenges the claim that these firms provide unique access to talent. For faculty who prioritize transparency and merit-based selection, these established practices raise valid concerns about the genuine value that search firms contribute and whether their role in presidential hiring truly serves the best interests of the academic community.
Shared Governance Under Siege
Over a century ago, the AAUP’s Committee on College and University Governance issued its first statement on what today is known as “shared governance.” It has been refined and updated over the years. In 1966, the current Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities was jointly formulated by the AAUP, the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, and ACE. It includes the following language: “Joint effort of a most critical kind must be taken when an institution chooses a new president. The selection of a chief administrative officer should follow upon a cooperative search by the governing board and the faculty, taking into consideration the opinions of others who are appropriately interested.” The statement clarifies that the faculty not only has a vested interest in selecting a president but also serves as the primary partner with the governing board.
Historically, especially at public universities, faculty involvement in presidential searches has taken two forms. The first, and most obvious, was serving on the search committee. Faculty members were typically the largest or second-largest group on the committee, depending on the number of board members serving on it. Until about a decade ago, faculty members also routinely participated in presidential searches by meeting candidates during visits to campus for public presentations. Such practices are rapidly disappearing.
Today, at the urging of search firms, candidates rarely visit campus to meet with faculty, staff, or students. When they do, it is usually in secret with a select group of faculty, often the faculty senate, who first must sign NDAs. This typically happens just a day or two before the governing board announces its decision. Once, faculty often were involved in the deliberation process for selecting a new president; now, at best, they are consulted. Search firms have successfully convinced governing boards that a closed search will yield the best candidates, when, in fact, such a search only reduces transparency and accountability and increases the potential for manipulation by the search firm.
Ethics and Accountability
The year after we published the findings of our study on search firm contracts, we received an invitation to present our research to the ACE Executive Search Roundtable, which describes its work as bringing “together nonprofit and for-profit organizations to address the mutual interests of ACE and executive search firms in identifying talented leaders for U.S. colleges and universities.” Essentially, it is a trade association of twenty search firms that provide their services to colleges and universities, fourteen of which self-identify as specializing in searches for presidents and chancellors. Member firms agree to abide by five principles, which are as close as they come to a code of ethics.
We suspected that most of the firms attending our presentation were interested in gathering intelligence on their competitors—possibly what was included in their fees and the amounts they charged. We made it clear from the beginning that we would not discuss either of these topics in a closed forum, fearing accusations of violating antitrust laws, and we suggested that they read our research.
We learned four things from this experience. First, despite being competitors, the firms are part of a close-knit community. We also discovered that, whether by design or happenstance, these firms have carved out niches. Those search firms focusing on searches for the presidents of flagship universities, top-tier private institutions, and large research universities rarely take on small private colleges or regional public universities. The converse is also true. Finally, it became clear to us that these firms have a strong preference for secret searches.
The most critical takeaway from this gathering is that it happens every year at the ACE annual meeting. Given that these firms effectively dominate nearly every aspect of presidential searches, the industry is undeniably in need of thorough scrutiny. There is a glaring absence of external regulations, standardized professional ethics, and meaningful oversight.
For example, some search firm contracts contain language that prohibits them from poaching a president whom they placed in a previous search. But this doesn’t prevent a candidate from “applying” for a position that the search firm is now managing. Other contracts allow the firm to earn an additional fee if a second candidate is hired from the pool, albeit for a different position.
As previously noted, we have found that approximately one-third of contracts are contingency-based. The problem with these fees, which are based on compensation during the first year of employment, is evident: It is in the search firm’s interest to favor the candidate they believe will command the highest compensation package. Similarly, we identified several search firms that offer to conduct compensation studies for institutions, almost always for an additional fee. Again, if the firm’s fee is linked to the president’s compensation, the firm faces an inherent conflict of interest.
Some search firms participate, directly or indirectly, in salary negotiations—another ethical minefield. We know of one instance in which the search firm was asked to provide a candidate’s salary history. The information the firm provided turned out to be incorrect, resulting in the university paying significantly more than anticipated. When this became public, the firm not only refunded its entire fee but also was banned from conducting future searches in the state.
Another questionable business practice is the collection of the entire fee well before the search is completed—typically between sixty and ninety days after the contract is signed. Consider the analogy of a kitchen renovation. No savvy consumer would pay the entire cost before the project was completed. Most of us would retain a holdback not only to ensure the project’s completion but also to ensure that the con tractor did the job correctly.
One final questionable practice is the inclusion of a guarantee to conduct a new search if the candidate leaves the position within one year, typically with the stipulation that the departure be voluntary. However, with the increasing prevalence of secret searches, issues typically don’t arise until after the candidate is hired. In instances where the governing board is compelled to terminate the president for cause or without cause, the search firm is often held harmless, even though there may have been a lack of due diligence.
Ultimately, these concerns highlight the need not only for greater transparency but also for reassessment of some practices. The current system tends to favor the interests of search firms. There are misaligned incentives, self-regulated ethics, and weak guardrails in place. As a result, presidential searches have become increasingly transactional, influenced more by private consultants than by the institutions involved. These issues must be addressed for colleges and universities to regain control over the processes and promote genuine accountability.
Reclaiming the Process
In 2015, the AAUP issued its Statement on Presidential Searches. The statement’s primary focus concerns “decisions by governing boards to conduct searches for new presidents or chancellors in secret, abandoning the previously standard practice of inviting a select group of finalists to visit the campus and meet publicly with faculty and other members of the campus community.” The statement concludes with the following recommendation: “The AAUP thus calls upon colleges and universities to resist calls for closed, secretive searches and reaffirm their commitment to transparency and active faculty engagement in the hiring of higher administrative officers. Faculty members should demand that their institutions observe established norms of shared governance by involving faculty representatives in all stages of the search process and by providing the entire faculty and other members of the campus community the opportunity to meet with search finalists in public on campus.”
Unfortunately, since the publication of this statement, as we have documented, conditions have worsened. Consider what occurred during the last presidential search at our university, George Mason, in 2019–20. Our governing board, believing it was upholding the spirit of shared governance, appointed the president of our faculty senate as the cochair of the search committee, alongside a board member. But that was the extent of shared governance.
This faculty senator ignored the AAUP statement and accepted the advice of the search firm to con duct a secret search, despite explicit language in our faculty handbook stating, “The search and selection process must include opportunities for the General Faculty to meet with candidates who are finalists for the presidency.” At our institution, the “General Faculty” is defined as “all faculty who have full-time instructional, research, or clinical appointments at any George Mason University campus.” None of this occurred, although two days before the new president was announced, a handful of faculty senators who had signed NDAs met with the finalists, despite having no meaningful input in the process.
Neither the AAUP statements nor our research on search firms has had much effect on reforming, let alone diminishing, their influence in selecting presidents. As we wrote in 2023, “Their ubiquity doesn’t mean people know what to look for in a search firm.” We offered five recommendations to governing boards, search committee members, university lawyers, and procurement officers in hiring these firms.
- Be explicit about what you expect a search firm to do.
- Do not rely on the search firm’s standard contract.
- Don’t pay the consultant’s full bill upfront.
- Conduct your own background checks.
- Think carefully before accepting a contingency-based fee agreement.
To this we would add one new recommendation: Don’t rush the process.
These recommendations, of course, assume that the industry will continue to control the presidential searches. However, we believe there may be an alternative—something akin to “back to the future” or, borrowing a title from Jonathan Swift, “A Modest Proposal.”
Consider this proposal a call for presidential searches to be faculty-led or, at the very least, faculty-driven, with an emphasis on transparency and institutional values. The initial focus should be on policy reform spearheaded by faculty senates with a focus on the long-standing AAUP recommendations for conducting presidential searches. This might represent a significant shift for some of these bodies, as we have observed many of them being co-opted in the search process.
Reasserting Academic Values
The weight of evidence leaves little room for doubt: Executive search firms, as currently operated, present serious challenges to the governance structures and academic integrity of our institutions. In certain instances, these firms also can pose a threat to an institution’s reputation and even its finances. Their growing influence has come at a steep cost—weakening shared governance, reducing transparency, and undermining public trust. These are not minor procedural concerns; they are fundamental threats to institutional autonomy, the diversity of academic leadership, and the future of academic freedom itself.
If this trajectory continues unchecked, we will be left with a leadership selection process shaped almost entirely by firms whose interests lie outside the academy. That outcome is neither inevitable nor irreversible. Faculty must take the lead. We must demand reforms that restore transparency, enforce accountability, reduce costs, and realign presidential searches with the core values of our institutions. This begins with reasserting the role of faculty senates and governance bodies—not as tokens on a search committee, but as full partners in the process.
At the end of the day, choosing a president is more than just filling an administrative position. It represents a pivotal moment for a university. This decision should embody the institution’s mission, values, and vision for the future—not merely the business model of an unregulated industry.
Judith A. Wilde is a research professor and James H. Finkelstein is a professor emeritus, both of them in the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University.