2025 AGB Survey of Board Professionals

Board professionals play crucial planning, coordination, and support roles in the day-to-day life of college, university, system, and foundation governing boards. Their work is often conducted behind the scenes but is critical to board success and performance.

Since 1991, AGB has surveyed this group to capture the changing nature of their roles over time. The 2025 AGB Survey of Board Professionals, a follow-up to a study conducted in 2020, continued to investigate this topic, including their reporting relationships, compensation, years of experience, and more.

Once again, the results of this periodic longitudinal survey show that those serving in board professional roles are an integral part of institutional, system, and foundation shared governance. Although these latest data show some demographics have shifted with the passage of time, job turnover has begun to appear in the data, and the COVID-19 pandemic brought more duties and changes in working environments that have continued in 2025.

The downloadable full report provides a detailed profile of today’s board professional in a particularly tumultuous time for higher education.