Title:

Student Persistence Advisor

Department:

Office of Student Persistence

Reports To:

Director, Office of Student Persistence and Re-Enrollment

Position Type:

Staff

Position Summary:

The Office of Student Persistence provides support services for students to promote student persistence and student success. Reporting to the Director of Student Persistence (DSP), the Student Persistence Advisor will assist the DSP in implementing a comprehensive persistence action plan for New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), including making personalized student outreaches, and daily monitoring of student persistence. As a self-starter, the Student Persistence Advisor should exhibit a high level of creative problem-solving abilities, resourcefulness, and competency to work on complex business issues; is capable of multi-tasking while meeting different deadlines; and works closely with student affairs staff. The Student Persistence Advisor plays a pivotal role in meeting the University’s enrollment goals.

Essential Functions:

• Carry out a comprehensive persistence action plan for student persistence that aligns academic and campus resources to improve retention and student success, including early outreach to transfer students to effect seamless transition to enrollment.

• Tracks in real time, student registration and student persistence activities to ensure the university is on target to meet its enrollment goals for the returning students.

• Coordinates interventions to support students’ ability to academically persist, recover and succeed.

• Utilize tools such as EAB Navigate to monitor and support the retention efforts.

• Collaborates with academic departments, faculty and advisors to implement targeted interventions to increase student retention and success.

• Collaborates with student success services such as Tutoring, Career Development Services, Office of Global Initiatives, Center for Counseling and Psychological Services, etc.

• Collaborates with enrollment management offices, such as Admissions, Financial Aid, Registrar, Bursar on student issues impeding student persistence.

• Implements strategies to positively impact key metrics, such as graduation rates, student satisfaction, student persistence goals and satisfaction of academic progress.

• Collaborates with academic units to further strengthen efforts, coordinate strategies, assess effectiveness, and enhance students’ student persistence, and engagement.

• Outreaches to returning undergraduate students to identify and address any issues that affect their persistence.

• Outreaches to transfer students to identify and address any issues that affect their persistence.

• Interprets and maintains compliance with university policies and procedures.

• Carry out a communication plan to support the student persistence plan.

• Serve on University committees that support student retention initiatives.

• Other duties as assigned.

Prerequisite Qualifications:

• Master’s degree in counseling, social work, higher education/student affairs, education or human services-related field.

• At least three years of student counseling or academic support experience in higher education.

• Strong interpersonal skills and the ability to work effectively with a wide range of constituencies in a diverse community.

• Excellent public speaking skills and ability to present the University to individual students as well as large diverse audiences in a positive manner. Strong written and verbal skills to support relationship building with prospective students and other constituents.

• Availability to work regular hours, weekends and evenings as needed.

• Familiarity with the working of student services and academic offices such as Admissions, Financial Aid, Bursar, and Academic Advisement.

• Proficiency with Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint).

• At the university's discretion, the education and experience prerequisites may be exempted where the candidate can demonstrate to the satisfaction of the university, an equivalent combination of education and experience specifically preparing the candidate for success in the position.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Prior experience involving student persistence or student outreach.

• Familiarity with most current student success or student persistence research and theories.

• Familiarity with Banner, Slate, ISSM, SEVIS, Banner Relationship Management, and/or Document Imaging. Ability to quickly adapt to new and changing software systems is also preferred.

Bargaining Unit:

PSA

Range/Band:

24

FLSA:

Exempt

Full-Time