Registrar and Director of Academic Records

Role Overview

The Registrar & Director of Academic Records is the senior institutional leader accountable for the design, construction, and ongoing integrity of every registrar function at Meritus College, from the student information system and academic catalog to degree audit, conferral, transfer credit, FERPA administration, and accreditation-facing reporting.

This is a founding role in the literal sense. There is no legacy SIS configuration to maintain, no catalog to reprint, no degree audit to run, no policy manual to inherit. There is a first cohort, an accreditation timeline, a competency-based academic model that does not map cleanly onto conventional registrar practice, and a blank page. The Registrar decides and then documents, defends, and operationalizes how academic progress at Meritus College is measured, recorded, awarded, and reported.

The role carries three horizons simultaneously: keeping the current cohort running cleanly, building infrastructure that will hold at ten times the enrollment, and producing the evidence base that will withstand accreditation and federal scrutiny. The Registrar supports the college leadership team, and is the institution’s definitive authority on the student record.

What makes this role unusual

Full functional ownership: All registrar functions. The person in this seat sets the standard rather than administering someone else’s.

Design authority, not just execution authority: The policies, definitions, calendars, and data structures do not exist yet. This role writes them and shepherds them through governance.

Challenging technical problems: Translating a competency-based, mastery-progression model into a credit-hour-defensible, auditable, federally reportable record is one of the more interesting unsolved problems in the field. This role owns it.

Permanence. The architecture built in the first eighteen months will govern this institution’s records for decades.

Core Responsibilities

Responsibilities include, but are not limited to, the following:

1. Build and Lead the Office of the Registrar

Draft the institutional policy stack. Draft, socialize, and shepherd through governance the full body of registrar policy: registration and enrollment, grading, academic standing, satisfactory academic progress, engagement and attendance, leave and withdrawal, transfer credit and prior learning, degree conferral, records retention, and transcript issuance.

Establish the Academic Catalog as the institutional document of record. Own its content architecture, approval workflow, version control, publication cycle, and archive and ensure the catalog, the enrollment agreement, and the SIS configuration never diverge from one another.

Stand up registrar service infrastructure. Build intake and case management, published service-level standards, escalation paths, and student- and faculty-facing self-service documentation so that the function scales on process rather than on heroics.

Define the system of academic authority. Establish who may change a grade, waive or substitute a requirement, release a record, reverse a withdrawal, or certify a completion and the documentation and audit trail required behind each action.

Support Implementation of SIS. Lead requirements definition, configuration, academic structure setup, and lifecycle governance; with IT Lead, make and defend the build decisions.

2. Own the Institutional Data of Record

Establish the institutional data dictionary for student records. Define and implement what constitutes enrollment, active status, the unit of academic progress, completion, and good standing, so that no two teams report different numbers for the same thing.

Institute data integrity controls. Build validation rules, reconciliation cycles, exception reporting, census-date freezes, and period-close discipline; personally certify the accuracy of official data before it leaves the institution.

Establish records custody, retention, and continuity. Set retention and destruction schedules, disaster recovery provisions, and the permanent record custody and teach-out plan required by regulators and accreditors.

3. Registration, Academic Progress, and Conferral

Own the academic calendar. Set and publish registration, add/drop, census, withdrawal, grading, and conferral dates across all programs and terms, and align them with financial aid, coaching, instruction, marketing, and enrollment operations.

Support enrollment lifecycle end to end. Registration, add/drop, withdrawal, leave of absence, reinstatement, track or program change, enrollment verification, and the learner-facing communication attached to each.

Build and own the degree audit. Encode program requirements, operate progression checks, resolve exceptions and substitutions with documented rationale, and certify candidates for conferral.

Design credential issuance end to end. Diploma production, digital credentials, transcript design and legend, secure delivery, and third-party degree verification.

Support transfer credit and prior learning. With academic leads, set evaluation criteria and faculty consultation protocols, establish articulation from Merit America programs and industry-recognized certifications into Meritus College credit, define awarding limits and residency requirements, and administer posting and appeals.

5. Accreditation and Regulatory Reporting

Produce the registrar’s contribution to accreditation. Author the relevant self-study sections, assemble and maintain the evidence file, and serve as a named institutional respondent in site visits, interim reports, and substantive change filings.

Own registrar-side state authorization obligations. Enrollment tracking by state, professional licensure disclosure records, complaint documentation, and coordination with institutional compliance on reciprocity and reauthorization requirements.

Support institutional effectiveness reporting. Define cohorts, census methodology, and persistence, retention, and completion metrics such that internal dashboards and external filings reconcile to the same source of truth.

Build registrar literacy across the institution. Train faculty, coaches, admissions, and student services on records obligations, FERPA, deadlines, and grading practice translating regulatory complexity into instructions people can actually follow.

Skills and Competencies

We recognize that individuals from marginalized backgrounds, including women, people of color, and those with disabilities, are often less likely to apply when they don’t meet 100% of the job qualifications. Don’t let that be the reason you miss out on this opportunity. Your unique skills, experiences, and perspectives are valuable, and we encourage you to apply if you can demonstrate many of the skills and competencies below.

Must Haves

Experience

Eight or more years of progressively responsible experience in a registrar’s office, academic records, or academic operations function in higher education, including at least three years at the associate registrar level or above.

Demonstrated ownership of core registrar systems and processes having personally led at least one substantial build or rebuild, such as an SIS implementation or migration, a degree audit build, a catalog or curriculum-of-record system, or a transcript and credentialing redesign.

Policy authorship experience. A track record of writing academic policy and moving it through institutional governance.

Accreditation experience. Direct participation in self-study, evidence preparation, site visits, substantive change filings, or annual reporting.

Technical and regulatory expertise

Deep FERPA fluency, including practical judgment in ambiguous disclosure situations, not only policy recitation.

Student information system expertise: the ability to define requirements, drive configuration decisions, understand the underlying data model, troubleshoot at the