The Firm
A firm built to serve higher education, and only higher education.
We are operators as well as advisors, drawn from executive roles across the institutions, systems, and organizations that shape the sector. We exist to help leaders solve the challenges that matter most, and to do it with rigor, candor, and care.
Our mission
Lynnerup & Ansell helps leaders across the higher education sector solve their most vital challenges. We partner with colleges, universities, systems, foundations, and technologists to drive transformative, measurable, enduring improvements, acting as trusted, objective advisors dedicated to your success.
Our values
The commitments that do not bend.
Client First
Your interest comes before our fees, our convenience, and our preferences. We take on an engagement only when we are confident we can deliver substantial, measurable improvement, and we treat your resources with the same care we would apply to our own.
Candor
We give you our honest, independent, fact-based view, including the findings that are difficult to hear. Counsel is valuable only when it is objective, so we tell you what we believe you need to know, grounded in evidence and delivered with respect.
Client Confidence
We hold your confidences as inviolable. Absolute confidentiality is a bedrock standard of our work. We exist to make you successful, and we never trade on your name, your data, or your strategy.
Meritocracy of Talent
Your challenge is met by the best minds we can bring to it. We assemble teams on capability and fit for your specific problem, so the people working on your behalf have earned their place through the quality of their thinking.
Obligation to Dissent
The strongest answer reaches you because every member of our team, regardless of seniority, is expected to challenge a recommendation they believe is flawed. Your work benefits from rigorous, fact-based debate before any conclusion is placed in front of you.
Professional Judgment
We exercise judgment and initiative on your behalf rather than waiting for instruction when the right course is clear. Every choice we make is tested against a single question: does this advance your mission?
Advancing the Sector
We contribute original, rigorous thinking to higher education beyond any single engagement. The insight we develop for the field is the same insight we bring to your most complex challenges.
The founders
Co-founders and Senior Partners.
Rasmus Lynnerup
Senior Partner
Rasmus Lynnerup is a transformative leader with more than twenty years of experience spanning strategy consulting and executive roles across the public and civic sectors. He has served as Vice President at Arizona State University, as Executive Vice Chancellor and Chief Strategy and Academic Officer for the City Colleges of Chicago, where he led the Reinvention reform program, and as a Principal at the Civic Consulting Alliance, following strategy and operations work with McKinsey & Company in Europe and North America. A first-generation college student, he is driven to build a more transparent and integrated public higher education system.
Charles Ansell
Senior Partner
Charles Ansell has dedicated his career to designing and executing student success reforms across urban institutions, statewide systems, and national networks. He has served as Vice President at Complete College America, as Chief Operating Officer for the Community College System of New Hampshire, and as Senior Associate Vice Chancellor at the City Colleges of Chicago, where he helped design and implement a systemwide structured pathways model. A nationally recognized expert in connecting metrics to action, he helps institutions use data and AI to build systems that reflect the real journey of the learner.
Careers
If you are exceptional.
We hire rarely and with deliberation. This is a demanding place by design, because the challenges our clients face are consequential and the people they serve deserve advisors who hold themselves to an exceptional standard. We do not post open roles. If your work is distinctive, we want to hear from you.
Leadership
The capacity to take ownership, build coalitions, and move institutions toward difficult objectives, with or without formal authority.
Analytic strength
Fluency with data, financial reasoning, and evidence, and the ability to turn complex analysis into clear insight for presidents, provosts, and boards.
Creativity
Original thinking and the adaptability to find a way forward where there is no established playbook.
We work remotely, we judge output over hours, and we invest deeply in the growth of every colleague.