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: 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. 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. 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 #J-18808-Ljbffr meritamerica