About the Role
The School of Public Policy’s (SPP) Admissions Counselor supports all aspects of the multi-deadline application and pre-enrollment processes for the School’s graduate programs, supporting the conversion of domestic and international applicants to enrolled students.
Responsibilities
- Supports the student application completion process and serves as the admission and financial aid advisor for prospective and newly accepted students.
- Maintains admission process tracking data and works with partners to provide student services and communications during the pre-enrollment lifecycle of a student.
- Serves as an interface between multiple university offices to provide student services that leads to a high rate of application completion and enrollment conversion.
- Creates and maintains admissions procedures for the graduate programs.
- Evaluates domestic and international students’ academic records including foreign transcript review.
- Reviews admission documents for completeness.
- Follows up regularly with the applicants on required documents for timely completion of the application.
- Manages application triage and renders admissions decisions when appropriate based on established criteria or coordinates with admission committees for review and decisions about admissions and financial aid support to applicants.
- Tracks and manages admissions offers and deposits to optimize established enrollment yield goals.
- Facilitates student record creation and communicates application status and decisions.
- Facilitates visa document issuance to international students.
- Trains and supervises student staff.
- Supports and participates in admissions and yield related events as required.
- Supports special projects based on the needs of the School and other duties as assigned by supervisors.
- Serves in a back-up role for other School staff as appropriate and needed.
Requirements
- Bachelor's Degree and 1 year of administrative experience.
- Excellent interpersonal communication skills with the ability to create and maintain harmonious relationships with a diverse population of staff, faculty, students and off-campus constituents and work both independently and to be part of an effective team.
- Flexibility to work with initiative and willingness to take on a variety of tasks related to the successful operation and administration of the unit.
- Ability to work effectively under pressure and varying situations with independence, competent judgment and discretion.
- Extensive organizational skills and attention to detail with the ability to complete assignments in a timely manner, balancing the demands of concurrent and potentially competing projects.
- Excellent writing skills with the ability to effectively communicate critical messaging to a student audience.
- Ability to collect data from multiple sources and create new reports that add value to program goals.
- Excellent computer usage skills including email, spreadsheets (including formulas), word processing, and databases.
- Ability to investigate a situation, seek out additional information, and resolve discrepancies.
- Ability to think through problems, organize information, identify key factors and underlying causes to generate solutions.
- Ability to read, understand, apply and explain rules, regulations and policies/procedures related to duties.
- Ability to understand and follow complex oral and written instructions and create effective and efficient work processes.
- Ability to exercise sound judgment and maintain confidentiality.
Skills
- Interpersonal communication
- Teamwork
- Initiative
- Flexibility
- Working under pressure
- Organizational skills
- Attention to detail
- Writing skills
- Data collection
- Report creation
- Computer proficiency (email, spreadsheets, word processing, databases)
- Problem-solving
- Following instructions
- Judgment
- Confidentiality
- Admissions and application processing
- International academic documents review
- Customer service
- CRM application management
Location
- Amherst
Work Type
- Full Time
- Hybrid
Experience Level
- 1 year of administrative experience
- Experience working in higher education
- Experience in admissions and application processing
- Customer service experience
Education Level
- Bachelor's Degree
Salary/Compensations
- Pay Grade: PSSAP Grade 25
- Refer to Professional Staff Hiring Ranges
About the Company
- The School of Public Policy (SPP) is part of the College/School/MBU: Social & Behavioral Sciences at the University.
