In the next seven years, approximately thirty-five percent of senior leaders in higher education will be eligible for retirement. That's not a statistic I'm pulling from a consultant's report. That's what I'm seeing in client after client right now. And the time to prepare for it was three years ago. The second-best time is right now.
I was at a regional consortium meeting recently where a provost from a peer institution mentioned casually that they were recruiting for a dean position — their third dean search in four years. When I asked what had happened to the previous two, the answer was age-related retirement. The institution had no succession plan, so when the first one retired, they did an external search. Got someone new. Eighteen months later, life happened and that person moved on. Another search. This cycle burns out faculty governance committees, exhausts search consultants, and costs enormous amounts of institutional energy and cash. But there's something worse underneath it: it signals that nobody's thinking about the future.
Higher education is unique in how it produces leadership. Unlike corporate environments where people climb a well-defined ladder, academic leadership emerges through faculty governance, committee work, and gradual assumption of responsibility over years. It's organic. It's slow. It's supposed to be meritocratic. But that pipeline — that thing that used to naturally produce deans, provosts, and presidents — is running dry. And most institutions haven't noticed.
Why the Academic Leadership Pipeline Is Breaking
The traditional path worked like this: you're a faculty member doing your discipline. Over time, you take on committee responsibilities, you show leadership in governance, and people notice. You might become a department chair, then an associate dean, then a dean. If you're good, you get promoted upward. If you're very good, you become a provost or president. It wasn't fast, but it was relatively reliable. Faculty who aspired to leadership had a path. Institutions had a pipeline of people who understood the institution and the academic mission.
That system is collapsing for three reasons. First, faculty work is already over-committed. Teaching, research, service, committee work, and now increasing attention to student mental health and diversity initiatives means the faculty who could step into leadership roles are already at capacity. Asking someone to take on a department chair role or serve on a high-level committee isn't a promotion. It's a burden. And burnout is high enough already.
Second, the economics of academic administration have changed. Administrative positions used to come with significant status and modest additional compensation. Now, as universities face financial pressure, administrative salaries haven't kept pace, yet the work has expanded enormously. You're expected to be an expert in finance, compliance, technology, fundraising, and human dynamics. All at compensation that's maybe ten percent more than a senior faculty member. The cost-benefit proposition looks awful to the people who might otherwise take it on.
Third, and most importantly, there's generational shift in how people think about career. Younger faculty are less likely to aspire to administration. They came into academic careers for intellectual work, not for management. Administration is increasingly seen as distancing you from your discipline and your research. The people who used to see administration as a calling now see it as a detour from what they actually care about.
The result is that most institutions have no genuine pipeline of leadership candidates. When a dean retires, there's no clear successor who's been developed and is ready. So you search externally. Sometimes you find someone good. Often you don't. Either way, you've lost the generational transfer of institutional knowledge, values, and informal relationship networks that made institutions actually work.
The Specific Costs of Not Planning Succession
You can quantify some of the costs. A typical executive search — search firm, consultant, committee time, opportunity cost — runs seventy-five to one hundred twenty-five thousand dollars. Longer search cycles cost more. Interim leadership creates drift in strategic initiatives. Vacant positions create burden on remaining staff and faculty. The faculty governance process for selecting new leaders is lengthy and energy-intensive. You can add all that up and get to millions of dollars for a single leadership gap.
But the unmeasured costs are actually more significant. When you lose a senior leader without a succession plan, you lose institutional knowledge that walks out the door. You lose the informal networks and relationships that actually make the institution function. You lose continuity of vision. And if you bring in an external leader, you spend a year or more while that person learns the institution, understands its politics and culture, and builds relationships.
I worked with an institution where a president retired suddenly and they took fourteen months to hire a replacement. During that time, a major fundraising campaign stalled. Faculty deferred retirement decisions because they were uncertain about direction. A strategic partnership with a local research institution fell apart because there was nobody with authority to negotiate it. The interim president kept things stable but couldn't move anything forward. By the time the new president arrived, some momentum had been lost permanently. Donors who'd been engaged had moved on. Faculty who'd been ready to engage with new directions had become skeptical about whether this institution could actually execute.
That's the real cost of succession planning failure in higher education. It's the organizational inertia that sets in. It's the opportunity cost. It's the signal you send to faculty, staff, and external partners that this institution isn't thinking strategically.
What Succession Planning Actually Looks Like in Higher Ed
Succession planning in higher education is fundamentally different from corporate succession planning because the context is different. You can't simply groom an internal candidate in a high-visibility, high-impact role the way you might in a corporation. You can't tell the provost that their job is partly about preparing to become president. The governance structure doesn't work that way.
But you can be intentional. You can identify faculty and professional staff with leadership potential and create development experiences for them. You can bring them into governance committees where they get exposure to institutional thinking. You can offer them stretch roles and provide mentoring. You can be transparent about what leadership looks like in your institution and create pathways for people to explore it.
Effective succession planning in higher ed also means being realistic about who can be developed internally and who you'll need to recruit externally. Some positions — president, provost in many cases — may benefit from external recruitment because you need different perspectives or different skills. But you should be developing backup candidates anyway, people who are ready to step into other leadership roles if the primary successor doesn't work out or takes another opportunity.
It also means having difficult conversations with sitting leaders. If a dean is near retirement, you need to know that. You need to plan for it. You need to start identifying who might succeed them and what development they'll need. If you wait until someone retires, you're always behind. If you start three to five years early, you can actually be thoughtful about it.
Three Practical Starting Points
If your institution doesn't have an active succession planning process, here's where to start. First, create visibility about who's at risk of retirement. This isn't about forcing anyone out or pressuring older leaders. It's about acknowledging reality and planning for it. Work with your finance and benefits team to understand who's eligible or near-eligible for retirement. Meet with those leaders individually and ask, in a low-pressure way, what they're thinking about their timeline. You'll be surprised how transparent people are when asked directly. Some will tell you they have no plans to retire soon. Others will say they're thinking about the next five years. That matters.
Second, identify high-potential people at various levels — faculty, professional staff, mid-level managers — who have demonstrated leadership capability and might aspire to more significant roles. Then be deliberate about their development. Don't assume they'll figure it out on their own. Create mentoring relationships with sitting leaders. Bring them into governance committees. Offer them stretch assignments. Make it clear that you see their potential and you're investing in it.
Third, build a transparent conversation about what leadership looks like in your institution and what pathways exist to get there. Many faculty don't aspire to administration because they don't see a clear path or they don't understand what it actually entails. If you're transparent about it, some people will be interested. Some won't. But at least you'll know who might be ready for what role and what development they'll need. That's infinitely better than discovering there's nobody ready when someone retires.
Succession planning doesn't happen overnight. But if you start now, you can build genuine leadership pipeline over the next three to five years. By the time the retirement wave arrives fully, you'll be ready. If you wait, you'll be in reactive mode. And reactive mode is how institutions lose momentum and strategic direction.