Return to Institute Homepage Sponsors

TIAA was founded in 1918 to help teachers retire with dignity. That mission grew to include those in healthcare and more, creating reliable income for their futures while they work to make a difference today. Our commitment to doing the right thing—for our customers, employees and communities—has never wavered, and is why today, we’re an industry leader in building financially sound futures.

EAB’s mission is to make education smarter and communities stronger. The firm harnesses the collective power of more than 2,100 institutions to uncover and apply proven practices and transformative insights. From kindergarten to college and beyond, EAB partners with education leaders to accelerate progress and drive results across three key areas: enrollment management, student success, and institutional strategy.

Ellucian is a software company in the higher education space with offices around the world. Ellucian guides over 2,700 customers in more than 50 countries, improving operations and enhancing the user experience for their faculties, staff, and over 26 million students.

National Management Resources Corporation was founded in 1978. National provides services exclusively to private institutions of higher learning. Services include physical plant maintenance and repair, custodial, landscape, event planning and setups, security, and construction management. National tailors its services to meet the needs and goals of the clients the company serves. With National, a college can rest assured that its facilities look their best for recruitment, retention, and advancement. National helps make colleges and universities look picture perfect all of the time.

Strada Education Network is a national 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to improving lives by catalyzing more direct and promising pathways between education and employment. Strada engages partners across education, nonprofits, business, and government to focus relentlessly on students’ success throughout all phases of their working lives. Together, they address critical college to career challenges through strategic philanthropy, research and insights, and mission-aligned affiliates — all focused on advancing the universal right to realized potential Strada calls Completion With a Purpose. 

Aramark delivers innovative dining and facility management solutions to create safe, healthy, and dynamic campuses that attract and engage students. As a partner to over 600 higher education institutions, their complete array of dining services includes master planning, culinary development and venue design, catering, concessions, and residential, full service, and express dining concepts. Aramark’s expertise in facilities services covers maintenance, custodial, grounds, energy and engineering solutions, capital project management, and building commissioning.

Farrell Day empowers college and university leaders to make data-informed decisions. The organization uses a proprietary combination of data, context, and expertise to help student-serving institutions achieve their goals. Farrell Day aggregates, analyzes, and benchmarks student record-level data from departments across campus and the larger higher education marketplace so that they can illuminate actionable insights for their clients.

Gonser Gerber LLP partners with college and university leaders who aim to increase their institution’s charitable giving results, enhance their institutional brand, and strengthen the human and financial capacities of their institutions. The firm believes that independent higher education helps promote the most virtuous of human impulses and makes our world more educated, healthy, caring, generous, and equitable for the benefit of all. Since 1950, Gonser Gerber has provided comprehensive advancement and leadership consulting services, professional development solutions, and customized executive search in support of presidents, board members, and advancement leaders at institutions throughout North America.

Jenzabar is a leader in delivering modern ERP, SIS, and data analytics solutions to higher education institutions around the world. Created out of a passion for education and driven by a vision of technology innovation, Jenzabar’s comprehensive suite of cloud-based solutions and services gives institutions the state-of-the-art functionality required to address the needs and expectations of today’s modern, digital-savvy students. With over 30 years of experience, Jenzabar supports more than 1,300 campuses worldwide with intuitive and powerful offerings than enable long-term success for both institutions and their students.

Johnson, Grossnickle and Associates takes an authentic approach to providing strategic and philanthropic consulting services to private colleges and universities. Their 25 years of experience is where their authentic approach first becomes apparent. JGA’s consulting team have been senior advancement officers, leaders of institutions, and philanthropic consultants. Whatever scenario or challenge leaders in higher education face, it’s likely someone on the team has faced it too. JGA’s breadth and depth of experience allow them to serve as thought leaders and openly share their experience and expertise. Every lesson they’ve learned along the way, they bring to the table to become their clients’ strengths.

Metz Culinary Management is a family-driven, privately owned company that collaborates with its clients to deliver restaurant-inspired hospitality to each and every guest since 1994. By taking the time to learn the needs of those they serve, Metz Culinary Management provides unsurpassed service that exceeds the needs of their guests. In 2020, Food Management Magazine named Metz Culinary Management one of its Top 15 Contract Management Companies in the U.S.

Sodexo, a leader in quality of life services, is committed to enhancing the learning environment on campus. By focusing on quality of life services, the company reinforces the overall experience of campus life, which in turn improves its partners’ effectiveness and performance. From designing meals around lifestyle needs to designing buildings for increasing enrollments, its commitment to providing students and staff a nurturing learning environment spans the entire campus experience. 

The Registry is the nation's leading firm in the interim executive space. It is the only membership-based interim placement firm, which provides a business model that preempts the need for expensive, time-consuming, and potentially disruptive open-market interim searches. Over the last quarter-century, the Registry has defined and institutionalized "best practices" for the engagement of interim executives. Now with over 1,000 members, the Registry is prepared to respond to the interim needs and requirements of colleges and universities in every sector and throughout the nation. The Registry can immediately generate interim candidate pools for presidents/chancellors, all cabinet positions, and deans. Most importantly, the Registry provides the very best interim talent, and its members continue to achieve the very best results for their college and university clients.

Wiley Education Services is a leading, global provider of technology-enabled education solutions to meet the evolving needs of universities, corporations, and ultimately, learners. Wiley partners with more than 70 institutions across the U.S., Europe and Australia, and supports over 800 degree programs. Their best-in-class services and market insights are driven by deep commitment and expertise—proven to elevate enrollment, retention, and completion rates.

​AGB Consulting is a leader in higher education, providing strategic and tactical guidance to colleges and universities on governance, the business model, and strategic issues.  Their experts craft solutions tailored to institutional needs, goals, and mission that help colleges and universities become more sustainable, competitive, and prosperous–and AGB Consulting provides assistance through implementation to ensure winning outcomes.

Acadeum, formerly known as College Consortium, works with CIC colleges and universities committed to sharing high-quality online courses to improve student success. Together, Acadeum and the CIC Online Course Sharing Consortium are unlocking the collective potential of institutions to ensure that all learners have access to the courses they need at the time they need them. More than 200 CIC members now use Acadeum’s cross enrollment platform to improve student retention and completion while increasing institutional revenue.

Blue Moon Consulting Group (BMCG) is a boutique consulting firm focused on higher education. They provide insight, counsel, and experience to help colleges and universities effectively manage real-time response to significant issues and crisis events. BMCG also helps institutions mitigate issues and avoid crises altogether through the development of proactive crisis management, crisis communications, emergency management, and business resiliency plans, and by conducting training, exercises and leadership sessions.

Capture Higher Ed is a leading enrollment management and marketing firm that helps higher education institutions make personalized, data-driven, timely and measured connections with prospective students. Powered by the industry’s only Behavioral Intelligence Platform—combining marketing automation, predictive modeling, and a managed service approach—Capture’s marketing solutions and expert services are designed to identify, convert, and enroll the right students for colleges and universities. Capture generates the industry’s strongest enrollment outcomes for client institutions, from hitting application targets to achieving net tuition goals.

Credo has partnered with college and university presidents, cabinets, and boards across critical areas of institutional strategy and operations for more than 25 years. Credo's strategic planning and student success engagements are enriched by in-house leadership, enrollment, financial aid, campus master planning, and architecture expertise. Keeping students always at the center, Credo's action-oriented, results-driven partnerships connect to people and culture as the most powerful vehicles to impact transformational student experiences. Informed by proprietary research on institutional thriving and propelled by a robust team of higher education experts, Credo complements your on-campus talent with external context, strategy, support, and accountability.

​Gray Associates provides higher education institutions with the data, advanced analytical tools, and rigorous research they need to forecast decisions, assess the competition, and model economics. Gray’s exclusive data analytics tools and unparalleled analysis provide academic institutions with deep strategic insight.

​Nearpeer improves enrollment, student engagement, wellness, and inclusion. The firm’s Peer Engagement Platform connects students academically and socially with their peers in a private, virtual community that is focused on authentic, 1:1 peer connections between students. Nearpeer’s unique approach serves all students, with special focus on introverted and less confident students who are at higher risk of loneliness and isolation. They also have demonstrated outsized impact with underrepresented populations’ sense of belonging. Nearpeer’s impact on their partners’ enrollment yield, melt, and persistence deliver over $1 million per year in higher tuition revenue.

Pearl Meyer advises boards and senior management on the alignment of executive compensation with business and leadership strategy, making pay programs a powerful catalyst for value creation. Their industry experts focused exclusively on the higher education sector have helped hundreds of colleges and universities achieve their objectives.

​Raymond D. Cotton and Associates, attorneys at law, is a growing law firm and consultancy, located in Washington, D.C. and dedicated solely to higher education. The firm represents presidents, boards of trustees, and other top-level executives at colleges and universities on matters such as employment contracts, executive compensation, performance evaluation, and intermediate sanctions. They also conduct compensation studies of presidents. The firm’s primary partner is Raymond D. Cotton who has represented over 400 colleges, universities and presidents. 

Stevens Strategy, LLC is a full-service consulting firm specializing in managing the process of strategic change in colleges, universities, and schools. The firm offers professional services to the leaders of these institutions in the following areas: institutional vision and strategy, strategic organizational leadership, market and program analytics, finance and data analytics, and institution-wide policy manual development. Stevens Strategy’s consultants have extensive experience serving colleges, universities, and schools—including positions as present and former trustees, presidents, faculty members, vice presidents, and other senior staff—each with a particular area of expertise in leadership and management. The firm’s clients include independent and public institutions from the largest universities to the smallest colleges and schools in America and throughout the world. 

Ziegler provides its higher education clients with private placement structuring, capital raising, public private partnership structuring, strategic advisory services, equity and fixed-income sales and trading, for both rated and non-rated bond issues. The higher education practice complements Ziegler's other business lines in the healthcare, senior living and education sectors, allowing us to leverage our unique expertise in complex credit structures and financial advisory services. Through the practice, independent colleges and universities can learn what their competitors are doing, keep abreast of market trends, and take advantage of new financing opportunities.

BKD CPAs & Advisors provides audit, tax, compliance, and consulting services to higher education institutions nationwide, which can translate into practical, experience-based insight. From keeping up with evolving technologies and educational trends to evaluating whether the programs institutions offer benefit their reputation and bottom line, how campus leaders respond to their dynamic environment is important.

Derck & Edson, LLC‘s commitment to higher education is demonstrated through their numerous planning, enhancement, and athletics projects on campuses throughout the United States. The firm’s expertise is demonstrated by the lasting, positive impressions that their work leaves on college and university campuses. Since 1940, the company has been transforming campuses through planning, design, and implementation services that meet the needs of colleges and universities, including: feasibility studies, master planning, athletic facilities design, implementation services, engineering, GIS services, architectural services, site design, circulation solutions, construction observation, inventory and analysis, and identity enhancement. 

EIIA is a nonprofit, member-driven consortium, committed to protecting the promise of private, faith-inspired institutions of higher education through the delivery of innovative insurance and risk management solutions. EIIA integrates the collective wisdom of their members with industry expertise to achieve a dynamic partnership that generates extraordinary results for property and casualty, employee benefit programs, and student programs. 

​GMB Architecture + Engineering is an architectural and engineering firm specializing in higher education, sports, K-12 education, healthcare, corporate, and industrial environments. Founded as an architectural firm in 1968, their list of services quickly grew to include mechanical, electrical, civil, and structural engineering, interior design, and landscape architecture. GMB offices are filled with over 100 experts who enjoy sharing their knowledge, and it’s amazing what great minds can do when they work together. The firm has 50 years of learning, growing, and giving back under their belts and serve their clients from four offices: Holland, Grand Rapids and Royal Oak, Michigan, and Indianapolis, Indiana.

Hastings+Chivetta Architects, Inc. has provided architectural services including master planning, design, and construction oversight for more than 220 collegiate clients in 42 states across the nation. Founded in 1960, the firm is especially proud of the relationships they have strived to forge with their 83 CIC member institutions. Projects with these partners include STEM, student life, student housing, academic, recreation, and athletic facilities. Hastings+Chivetta brings a whole campus perspective to all their planning and design endeavors.

Hyatt-Fennell, Executive Search is a highly successful national and international executive search firm. The firm includes a strong support staff and excellent senior consultants who are rich in higher education and recruitment experience. Hyatt-Fennell is well-known and respected for placing top executives with private colleges and universities. Through a partnership with its clients, Hyatt-Fennell enhances and streamlines the search process and provides a commitment to find the perfect person for each position. Hyatt-Fennell brings over 60 years of experience to the process of client-centered service.

Spelman Johnson is an executive search firm. Founded in 1991, they are recognized for their work in identifying and recruiting outstanding leaders in education, advocacy associations, and social impact organizations. 

Synergis Education works with colleges and universities to develop, launch, and expand niche degree programs in face-to-face, online, and blended program formats. With a special focus on in-demand programs in nursing and education, Synergis assists institutions by providing expertise and resources devoted to marketing, recruitment, retention, instructional design, and data integration. Their approach is to enable institutional partners to extend their reach by creating high demand programs with environments and services that attract prospective students. Since 2011, Synergis has built and supported over 60 degree programs on behalf of its diverse institutional partners and has enrolled more than 12,000 students.

​Two Ocean Education Partners connects students with transformative educational opportunities. They leverage their combined expertise in higher education and Fortune 500 marketing to create new learner-first approaches to inquiry, application, and yield marketing. Informed by behavioral data, Two Ocean Education Partners’ responsive marketing deepens relationships with Gen-Z “super scanners” and value-seeking parents to move them towards right-fit educational experiences—all in the service of helping their partners achieve mission-critical enrollment, diversity, and revenue goals.

Ardeo Education Solutions is a public benefit company dedicated to increasing access to the life-changing impact of higher education. Ardeo’s Loan Repayment Assistance Programs (LRAPs) positively impact enrollment decisions, helping institutions provide a powerful benefit to students who may feel financially shut out. If a student’s income after graduation is modest, their LRAP will help repay their student loans, including federal student, private alternative and parent PLUS loans. 

Asset Strategy Consultants (ASC), celebrating its 30th year in 2021, continues to provide independent investment advisory services to endowments, foundations, retirement plans, operating reserves, and private wealth clients. With a long history of supporting educational clients, ASC advises on endowment portfolios as well as 403(b) plans for higher-ed. ASC’s thoughtful approach to investing helps manage risk and responsibility for institutions while achieving their individual investment needs and spending goals. Whether it be traditional consulting or an outsourced CIO model, ASC provides fiduciary oversight, education, and governance. In addition, growing 403(b) plans and offering financial wellness is how the firm helps college and university employees.

BHDP’s comprehensive suite of higher education services have advanced the mission at over one hundred postsecondary institutions over the past 60 years. Their team of strategists, planners, architects, designers, and higher education specialists are relied upon by postsecondary leaders nationally across all institutional types. BHDP’s expertise in the planning and design of academic and student facilities, teaching and research laboratories, and administration and student support spaces is founded upon their deep knowledge of the business of higher education and a passion for improving student and faculty experiences.

Goff Public is a full-service communications agency based in Minnesota that helps colleges and universities across the country protect and enhance their reputations. They offer media and spokesperson training and coaching; communications strategy and planning; issues management; 24/7 crisis response; media relations and storytelling; and communications and planning for high-profile events.

Lindauer is proud to be one of the world’s leading retained executive search firms focused on nonprofits, ranked in Hunt Scanlon’s 2020 list of the top 50 executive search firms in the United States. Since its founding more than 20 years ago, Lindauer has grown into a global firm serving education, health, arts, policy, foundation and charity organizations across the United States and on four continents. Long known as fierce advocates for diversity and inclusion, Lindauer remains a trusted partner, convener, leader and driver of equity, inclusion and anti-racism across the non-profit sector. Fortunate to partner with the world’s leading institutions, the firm offers a wide range of talent management, leadership and search services.

​Presence, a student learning and development platform, amplifies the story of a campus’s unique value. The experiences students engage in, their progress along learning pathways, and the employable skills they earn throughout their involvement are all on display in this solution set. Strong customer support guides partners through innovative co-curriculum design and retention strategy, leading to more engaged, better retained, and better prepared graduates able to articulate the value of their campus experience. With the landscape of the industry rapidly changing, Presence leverages the student experience to facilitate an institution’s confident and courageous decision-making.

RH Perry & Associates, an executive search firm, partners with institutions of higher education and other mission-driven organizations to identify outstanding leaders. Established in 1974, RH Perry’s senior consultants and administrative team bring higher education leadership experience and search expertise to every assignment. With an excellent national reputation and demonstrated record of success for CIC-member institutions, the firm is committed to representing their client institutions and engaging with candidates in the highest ethical and professional manner.

Steptoe & Johnson PLLC is a national law firm of more than 370 lawyers and other professionals practicing in 18 offices in Colorado, Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and West Virginia. The firm’s higher education team consists of attorneys from multiple disciplines who cater to the diverse legal service needs of independent colleges throughout the United States, including advice on a broad array of compliance issues and tax-exempt financing. The firm’s attorneys have held positions in higher education as in-house counsel, accountants, development officers, trustees, and faculty members, and they have extensive experience handling issues confronting multiple colleges. In short, the firm understands higher education and constantly aspires to provide cost-effective, pragmatic solutions based on that understanding.

​Westfall Gold has served institutions of higher education since its founding in 2002. Their model deepens relationships with strong financial partners, is consistent in reactivating lapsed givers, and is a very successful donor acquisition tool. Westfall Gold’s model strategically accelerates the relationship with high net worth and ultra high net worth families and creates a community of like-minded individuals who are moved to deeply engage financially and emotionally with the institution’s mission. A three-and-a-half day experience integrating the best practices in fundraising management consistently outperforms all other major donor strategies in cultivation time and effectiveness.

The Dysart Group is a higher education consulting firm specializing in recruitment, financial aid, college finance and retention. The firm has assisted more than 200 colleges and universities in 42 states on issues related to enrollment management and enrollment growth. The Dysart Group consistently integrates enrollment management with institutional objectives regarding net revenue, budgeting, and strategic planning. Their clients have included private colleges, state universities, proprietary schools and a variety of special mission institutions including Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), the first Historically Hispanic University in the country, more than a dozen women’s colleges, along with religion-affiliated schools of various denominations.