Even as students, families and government officials grow increasingly concerned about rising cost of college and student debt over the past several years, it’s become more common for public colleges and universities to pay private search firms tens of thousands of dollars to help them find their presidents.

And a study of the contracts between public schools and the search firms released Friday suggests that in many cases the firms participate in salary negotiations and in some cases are paid as percentage of the incoming president’s salary.

Roughly one in four of the 61 contracts reviewed by the research team, headed by James Finkelstein, a professor of public policy at George Mason University, included provisions saying that the search firm would participate in salary talks in some form. That included direct participation, conducting salary surveys and assessing candidate requirements, he said.

In addition, in about a quarter of the contracts, the search firms were paid as a percentage of the president’s salary. That has the potential to create a conflict of interest because firms are incentivized to get a better deal for presidents, even though they’re technically working for the schools, Finkelstein said.

“The practice of having search firms participating in negotiations struck us as a questionable practice,” he said. “There’s a real potential problem there, especially for those firms that operate on a contingency basis, because it’s in their interest to have a president paid more rather than less.”

It’s too early to say whether the widespread use of search firms in higher education has actually pushed presidential salaries up. Finkelstein says he plans to research that question. Presidential pay has been ticking up. Presidents of public colleges and universities were paid $428,250 on average last year, according to Chronicle of Higher Education data cited by The Wall Street Journal. That’s a 7% increase from the year before.

In a separate study of 115 presidential contracts, released Thursday, Finkelstein found that agreements between universities and their leaders are looking increasingly like contracts for corporate CEOs. Many feature perks like performance bonuses, salaried sabbaticals, and promises for a tenured professorship at a certain percentage of their presidential salary after they step down.

Though the use of executive search firms and their participation in salary negotiations may be common in corporate America broadly, applying that practice to the higher education space rankles critics like Finkelstein. In an environment where public college leaders are often bemoaning state funding cuts and in some cases tuition is rising, spending on the firms -- even if it’s a small percentage of a university’s budget -- can raise eyebrows.

The firms in Finkelstein’s study were paid between $25,000 and $160,000 for their services and the average fee was $78,769. Over several years the costs can add up. In the 10 years leading up to 2012, Illinois universities spent nearly $6 million on search firms to place deans, provosts, presidents and others, according to the News-Gazette, a central Illinois newspaper. Lawmakers in Illinois passed a law that year limiting state universities’ ability to use search firms for hiring. Now they can only use the firms to hire a president or in special cases when the president of the board of directors demonstrates a special need to use a firm.

These days most higher education institutions use search firms to help them land a president and in some cases they use the companies to help them fill other positions, like dean and provost Defenders of the practice note that finding a university president typically takes several months and is done under the authority of the school’s board of governors, who in many cases, are prominent members of the community without extensive higher education experience and are volunteering for the board on a part-time basis. And so they outsource the logistics of the process, including outreach to candidates and scheduling, to search firms, who often have access to a roster of candidates.

Though in the past it was typical for universities to conduct the searches without outside help, using ads and other means, that’s not feasible today, said Jan Greenwood, a partner at Greenwood -Asher & Associates, an executive search firm that conducts higher education searches.

She estimates that a very small percentage of the candidates she’s placed over the years came from ads. Instead, search firm staffers will take hundreds of calls and meetings over the course of a search, something that board and university community members who participate in the search process can’t be expected to do because they have other full-time jobs.

Finding qualified candidates who aren’t near retirement can also be a challenge, given that most high-level university officials are between their 50s and 70s, she said. What’s more, college presidents may face consequences if it appears they’re looking for another job; Greenwood said she knows presidents who have lost donations because of job searches, for example. Sunshine laws in many states mean that if colleges were conducting these searches on their own, the public could find out the candidates under consideration through open records requests and other means.

“These aren’t people sitting around looking for another job, these are people you have to recruit,” she said. Greenwood said that in her experience, firms typically work on a flat fee basis during large presidential searches.

Still, Finkelstein questions whether the firms are necessary and if universities are getting their money’s worth when they hire them. In his review of contracts, which he obtained through open records requests, he found that in many cases search firms didn’t conduct what most would consider basic due diligence, such as degree checks or criminal background checks without an additional fee. Greenwood said that’s because most search firms aren’t licensed to do FBI-style criminal background checks and so they typically outsource them to subcontractors.

That hasn’t kept the search firms from facing scrutiny when searches backfire. One came under fire last year after it failed to uncover that a candidate who ultimately became president of a major university was listing his current employment incorrectly on his résumé, according to trade publication Inside Higher Ed. The same firm assisted in a search that resulted in an athletic director who was ultimately fired over accusations of sexual harassment. The school’s president blamed the firm for not uncovering an earlier complaint during the search.

“The governing board of a public university has legal and fiduciary responsibilities and the single most important responsibility that they have is hiring the president,” Finkelstein said. “These firms are not altruistic, they’re there to make a profit for their owners and investors and the public universities are outsourcing their responsibility to them. It’s a public policy question to me, is this is something that the public believes boards should be outsourcing.”