About This Role
This role is for a precise, student-focused Academic Advisor to manage each founder's path to their bachelor's degree, from transcript evaluation to graduation. Founders are working adults building a business while finishing their degree, often with prior credits, full-time jobs, and families. The core task is to provide a clear degree plan and keep it updated as their lives change.
Responsibilities
- Review transfer credit evaluations, verify anything flagged for a human check, and validate transcripts against the College's requirements
- Map each founder's prior credits to the program, including which core curriculum requirements are already met
- Turn each evaluation into a personalized degree plan that sets out every semester to graduation, and tells the founder how many semesters they have ahead
- Register founders each term and update their plan when they add, drop, or change course load
- Run degree audits each term so every founder knows they're on track to graduate
- Meet each founder one-on-one by video or phone to walk through their plan and timeline to completion
- Explain how course load (for example, 6 vs. 12 credit hours a semester) affects time to graduation and financial aid, and route detailed aid questions to Student Financial Services
- Explain College policies in plain language: add/drop, withdrawal, incompletes, academic standing, probation, and leave of absence
- Offer some evening availability, because most founders work during the day
- Monitor grades, LMS engagement, and attendance, and reach out within 48 hours of an early alert
- Build and track success plans for founders on probation or returning after a break
- Work with Cohort Managers and mentors so academic and business-building issues are picked up together, not in separate places
- Document every advising interaction in our CRM and the College's student information system, in line with FERPA
- Coordinate with Onboarding, the Registrar, and Student Financial Services so handovers are clean
- Report on caseload persistence, progression, and graduation
- Turn recurring founder questions into SOPs and process improvements, so advising scales as the program grows
Requirements
- Two or more years in academic advising, student services, registrar, or enrollment work in higher education
- Knowledge of undergraduate transfer credit, degree audits, general education requirements, and academic policy
- Working knowledge of FERPA
- Experience advising adult learners, online students, or degree-completion students
- Attention to detail, because one misread credit can move someone's graduation date by a semester
- Ability to explain complex policy in plain, encouraging language, and hold founders accountable with warmth
