[Hiring] Registrar and Director of Academic Records @Merit America

Role Description

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. 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.
• 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.

Qualifications

• 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 structural level, and hold vendors accountable.
• Working knowledge of the federal and state regulatory environment affecting academic records, Title IV eligibility requirements and their records implications, state authorization and reciprocity obligations, and institutional reporting requirements including IPEDS and Clearinghouse reporting.
• Data fluency: The ability to define metrics precisely, interrogate data for integrity issues, produce accurate reporting, and explain discrepancies with confidence.

Requirements

• Comfort using AI tools to accelerate policy drafting, documentation, and research, with judgment about where they help and where they don't.
• Experience in emerging, start-up programming, colleges or universities.

Benefits

• Medical, Dental and Vision insurance (100% Paid Employee Only Coverage)
• Flexible Spending Account and Health Savings Account
• Dependent care Flexible Spending Account
• Health Reimbursement Account fully funded by Merit
• Education & personal development reimbursement
• Catalog of courses for professional learning and development
• Short and long-term disability
• Flexible PTO (after a 90-day introductory period)
• Paid Parental Leave and Adoption benefits (after 1 year of employment)
• 11 federally recognized holidays
• 2 week holiday office closure in December/January
• 401(k) retirement plan with automatic Merit contribution
• Wellness Benefits/Wellness Resources
• Discount perks at work program
• Phone/technology stipend
• Home office setup stipend
• Affinity groups and community building via virtual, in-person, and/or regional meetups