Assistant Vice President for Student Success – Student Life

POSITION SUMMARY:

The Assistant Vice President for Student Success provides leadership and vision for a campus-wide strategy to enhance student retention, persistence, and timely graduation, and preparedness for the world of work and a life of leadership and service. The AVP leads a team of professionals and functional areas who contribute directly to student success, while coordinating and collaborating on institutional strategy across campus. Informed by literature, best practices, and data analysis reflecting contributions to positive success factors and student attrition, the AVP will establish campus strategy and champion the collaborative campus-wide contributions to critical student success metrics.

DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES:

Provide strategic vision and leadership for campus-wide innovation and excellence in student success; monitoring, implementing initiatives, and improving success indicators. Provide leadership for campus optimization of Student Success Central as a hub of student resources.

Provide leadership and managerial oversight for areas contributing to student success, originally defined as:

Undergraduate Education & Student Success

Gussin Spiritan Division & Michael P. Weber Learning Skills Center

Center for Career Development

Disability Services

The Center: fostering student connection

Analyzes and utilize data to inform institutional goals and action to improve student success metrics, including student retention and degree completion. Liaise with the Office of Institutional Research on institutional reporting, evaluate trends and factors contributing to student success and student attrition, and consider relevant peer-benchmark data to implement changes informed by data insights. Work with campus partners to maximize the use of student success predictive data to drive and evaluate the effectiveness of appropriate intervention strategies utilizing Starfish (or future software). Produce reports for executive leaders, outlining student retention and success strategies and campus impacts.

Collaborates with campus partners to effectively define a coordinated approach to proactive student engagement with critical campus resources and individualized intervention and outreach for at-risk students. This will include serving on and leading various campus committees and initiatives including SPARK (Student Persistence And Retention Kickstart) Committee, and connecting with key constituencies across Academic Affairs, Enrollment Management and Student Life – including Provost’s Council, Student Success Coaches, and others.

Provides leadership and responsible oversight for all budgetary matters associated with offices under the leadership of this role. This includes oversight for endowed funds and related student scholarship decisions to support student financial need.

Serves on the Student Life senior leadership team, advancing broad strategic goals. Serve as a representative on University committees, taskforces and projects as appropriate.

Completes other duties as assigned.

SUPERVISORY RESPONSIBILITIES:

Supervises the work of others, including planning, assigning, scheduling and reviewing work, ensuring quality standards. Is responsible for hiring, terminating, training and developing, reviewing performance and administering corrective action for staff. Plans organizational structure and job content.

REQUIREMENTS: Minimum qualifications:

Master’s degree in Education, Counseling or related field from an accredited institution and 8+ years of work-related experience.

Preferred qualifications:

Doctoral degree in Education, Counseling or related field from an accredited institution.

Alternately, the successful candidate may possess any equivalent combination of experience and training, which provides the knowledge, skills and abilities required to perform the essential job functions. This includes, but is not limited to, the following:

Required:

• Demonstrated successful progressive levels of leadership in student affairs, academic support and/or enrollment management.
• Knowledge of critical trends in student retention and persistence to graduation, with a dedicated focus on undergraduate student population.
• Knowledge of the needs of graduate, online and professional student populations.
• Demonstrated understanding of needs of and commitment to serving students across an array of diverse identities, backgrounds and experiences.
• Demonstrated skills in fiscal planning and budget management.
• Demonstrated success in leading complex teams, mentoring individual professionals, and facilitating organizational change.
• Ability to analyze complex quantitative and qualitative data to inform decisions and drive institutional change.
• Demonstrated proficiency in technology and ability to master campus systems and develop new approaches to advance goals.
• Collaboration skills and ability to effectively coordinate campus strategy across various units.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills.
• Ability and willingness to contribute actively to the mission of the University and to respect the Spiritan Catholic identity of Duquesne University. The mission is implemented through a commitment to academic excellence, a spirit of service, moral and spiritual values, sensitivity to world concerns, and an ecumenical campus community.

Preferred

• Demonstrated skill utilizing campus software systems including Banner, Stellic, Starfish (or similar predictive analytic CRM tool with students).
• Experience teaching in the classroom.
• Ability to establish and maintain effective working relationships with the University Community.

APPLICATION INSTRUCTIONS:

Applicants are asked to submit a cover letter, resume, and contact information for three professional references.