Position Summary
The Executive Director of Institutional Effectiveness and Academic Initiatives is the college's senior-most leader for institutional research, assessment, accreditation, and strategic planning. Reporting directly to the President and serving on the President's Cabinet, the Executive Director builds and leads the function that tells The Cooper Union the truth about itself: how well it is serving students, whether its strategy is working, and where it should invest next.
This is a hands-on executive role at a small, distinctive institution. The Executive Director sets direction and also does the work — building the dashboard, running the analysis, drafting the accreditation narrative, facilitating the retreat. Success requires equal fluency in data engineering and faculty governance, and the credibility to be trusted by three deans with three very different disciplinary cultures.
The Executive Director serves as the college's Accreditation Liaison Officer to MSCHE and as the primary institutional steward for NYSED, federal, and external reporting obligations. Working in close partnership with the Chief of Staff, the Executive Director connects the President's priorities to measurable outcomes, ensures Cabinet and Board deliberations rest on sound evidence, and cultivates a culture in which data is used to improve, not merely to report.
Key Responsibilities
Strategic Planning and Institutional Strategy
- Lead the development, implementation, monitoring, and communication of the college's strategic plan, in partnership with the President, Cabinet, Board of Trustees, faculty, staff, students, and alumni.
- Translate strategic goals into a defined set of institutional KPIs with baselines, targets, owners, and reporting cadence; maintain a strategic plan dashboard accessible to the community.
- Facilitate Cabinet-level strategy sessions, planning retreats, and annual progress reviews; produce clear, candid progress reports that distinguish signal from noise.
- Partner with the CFO and Cabinet to connect planning to budget and resource allocation, so that strategic priorities are visible in how the college spends its money.
- Provide analytic support for enrollment strategy, pricing and financial aid modeling, program portfolio review, and scenario planning tied to the college's long-term financial sustainability and its plan to restore full-tuition scholarships.
- Conduct environmental scanning, peer and aspirant benchmarking, and market analysis to inform Cabinet and Board decision-making.
Institutional Research, Data, and Analytics
- Oversee the institutional research function, which serves as the institution's authoritative source for official data; establish and maintain a census/freeze process, a data dictionary, and agreed definitions for core metrics.
- Design and maintain dashboards and self-service reporting for Cabinet, deans, department chairs, and administrative units, prioritizing usability over volume.
- Lead data governance: convene a data governance group, define system-of-record ownership, establish access and privacy protocols, and resolve conflicting numbers before they reach the Board.
- Manage the institutional survey portfolio — student experience, alumni outcomes, employee engagement, exit and graduating-student surveys, and required climate assessments — including instrument selection, administration, analysis, and closing the loop on results.
- Respond to internal data and research requests with a defined intake process, service standards, and transparent prioritization; teach colleagues to interpret and use data rather than simply delivering files.
- Partner with IT and the Registrar on data architecture, integrations, and reporting infrastructure across the college's student information, learning management, CRM, and advancement systems.
Accreditation, Compliance and Academic Policies
- Serve as Accreditation Liaison Officer (ALO) to the Middle States Commission on Higher Education; maintain current expertise in MSCHE standards, requirements of affiliation, and policy changes, and advise the President and Cabinet on implications.
- Lead the college's MSCHE cycle end to end — self-study design and governance, steering and working groups, evidence inventory, writing and editing, team visit logistics, and follow-up reporting — including the Annual Institutional Update and substantive change submissions.
- Coordinate and support specialized program accreditation with the schools, including NAAB, NASAD, and ABET: maintain a shared accreditation calendar, build reusable evidence infrastructure, align data requests, and provide analytic and editorial support to faculty leading self-studies. Disciplinary content remains with the faculty; process, evidence, and quality control sit with this office.
- Own the college's external reporting calendar and ensure accurate, on-time submission of reports related to the following:
o NYSED — program registration and amendments, curriculum changes, HEDS/institutional data submissions, master plan matters, and Article 129-B climate survey obligations, in coordination with the Registrar, deans, and General Counsel.
o Federal — IPEDS (as Keyholder or coordinator), Clery-related statistical reporting support, Financial Value Transparency/Gainful Employment, National Student Clearinghouse, and College Scorecard data quality.
o External and voluntary — Common Data Set, guidebook and ranking surveys, consortium and peer-exchange submissions.
- Lead the college's academic policy work in partnership with the deans, the Registrar, faculty governance, and General Counsel: maintain the inventory of academic policies and a defined review cycle; facilitate drafting and revision; shepherd proposals through the appropriate faculty and administrative approval bodies; and ensure that policies are current, published, internally.
- Monitor regulatory, accreditor, and sector developments that carry academic policy implications — credit hour, transfer and prior learning credit, satisfactory academic progress, academic standing and integrity, grading, leave and withdrawal, and emerging questions such as generative AI in coursework — and bring forward timely recommendations to the President, Cabinet, and faculty governance.
- Oversee the Institutional Review Board and human subjects research compliance.
Assessment and Continuous Improvement
- Lead a coherent, sustainable, faculty-owned assessment system for student learning at the course, program, and institutional levels — one calibrated to a studio- and project-based institution rather than imported wholesale from a large research university.
- Partner with the deans and faculty governance to design and steward assessment of general education and the Humanities and Social Sciences curriculum.
- Build and facilitate a program review process on a defined cycle, integrating learning outcomes, enrollment and completion data, market and workforce context, resource requirements, and faculty self-appraisal into actionable recommendations.
- Extend outcomes assessment to administrative and support units, with a useful model that connects unit goals to strategic priorities.
- Maintain the institution's assessment repository and evidence base so that accreditation reporting is a byproduct of ongoing practice rather than a periodic emergency.
- Track and analyze post-graduation outcomes — employment, graduate study, licensure and registration pathways, and alumni achievement — in partnership with Career Services and Alumni Affairs.
Leadership, Culture, and Collaboration
- Build, lead, and develop a small, high-performing team; establish the office's service model, priorities, and standards, and shield it from low-value work.
- Establish the office as a trusted, neutral broker: rigorous about method, candid about uncertainty, and willing to deliver findings leadership may not want to hear.
- Partner closely with the Chief of Staff to align institutional priorities, Cabinet and Board agendas, and cross-divisional project execution.
- Prepare data-driven briefings, presentations, and written analysis for the President, Cabinet, Board of Trustees and its committees, and — as appropriate — accreditors, regulators, and external audiences.
- Represent the President and the college at internal and external convenings as requested; maintain active engagement with MSCHE, NYSED, AIR, and relevant professional networks.
- Advance a culture of evidence and continuous improvement through training, documentation, and consultation, building data literacy across faculty and staff.
- Handle sensitive and confidential institutional information with discretion, independent judgment, and integrity.
- Other duties as assigned.
Qualifications
Required
- Master's degree in higher education administration, educational leadership, assessment and evaluation, data analytics, statistics, social science, or a related field.
- Seven or more years of progressively responsible experience in institutional research, institutional effectiveness, assessment, or strategic planning in higher education, including direct, substantive experience with regional/institutional accreditation.
- Demonstrated success leading or playing a central role in a self-study, reaccreditation, or comparable major compliance effort.
- Strong applied analytical skills, including hands-on proficiency with data extraction, cleaning, and analysis and with a data visualization platform (Power BI, Tableau, or equivalent).
- Experience managing federal and state compliance reporting, including IPEDS.
- Experience designing, administering, and analyzing institutional surveys.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to render complex quantitative findings intelligible and useful to non-technical audiences — faculty, trustees, and the public alike.
- Demonstrated ability to work effectively with faculty governance and to earn credibility with academic leadership.
- High professionalism, discretion, and sound judgment in handling confidential information.
Preferred
- Doctorate (Ph.D. or Ed.D.) in a relevant field.
- Direct experience with MSCHE standards and processes, and service as an ALO or on MSCHE evaluation teams.
- Familiarity with NYSED requirements, including program registration and state reporting.
- Experience supporting specialized program accreditation, particularly NAAB, NASAD, ABET, or comparable professional accreditors.
- Experience at a small, private, or specialized institution — art, design, architecture, engineering, or conservatory — where assessment must be adapted to studio, portfolio, and project-based learning.
- Experience building an institutional effectiveness function from an early stage: establishing data governance, standing up dashboards, and creating processes where none existed.
- Familiarity with enterprise systems commonly used in higher education (student information systems, LMS, CRM, degree audit, advancement platforms) and the data flows among them.
- Facilitation and change management experience with senior leadership groups and faculty bodies.
Salary range: $165,000 - $180,000
