portrait of Lucie Lapovsky

Lucie Lapovsky

Lucie Lapovsky is an economist who consults, writes, and speaks widely on issues related to higher education finance, strategy, governance, and enrollment management. She also specializes in searches for chief financial officers and writes and speaks on issues related to women’s leadership. Her clients include public and private colleges and universities throughout the United States and various companies and organizations throughout the world. Recent CFO searches have been conducted for University of the Sciences in Philadelphia, Drew University, Sarah Lawrence College, Saint Mary’s College in Indiana, Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, and Portland State University in Oregon. In addition, she is actively engaged in research on tuition discounting and cost containment in higher education.

She served as president of Mercy College, a multi-campus institution of 10,000 undergraduate and graduate students with campuses in New York City, Westchester, and online from 1999 to 2004. Lucie has almost thirty years of experience in higher education finance in both the public and private sectors of higher education. Prior to coming to Mercy College, she served as vice president for finance at Goucher College, and worked at the University of Maryland at College Park, the Maryland Higher Education Commission, and the Maryland State Department of Budget and Fiscal Planning.

Dr. Lapovsky chairs the board of the National Council for Research on Women and serves on the boards of the American Public University System, Cedar Crest College, KnowledgeWorks, the Tuition Exchange, and HERS (Treasurer and Finance Committee chair). She also serves on the Committee of Visitors of Goucher College. In addition, she frequently serves on Middle States evaluation teams and has chaired several of these visits.

She is the co‐editor of three books: Strategic Financial Challenges for Higher Education: How to Achieve Quality, Accountability and Innovation; Roles and Responsibilities of Chief Financial Officers (both published by Jossey‐ Bass); and The White House Project Report: Benchmarking Women’s Leadership. She also is the author of more than 200 chapters and articles and is a frequent speaker at major higher education conferences.