Academic Program Coordinator Job Description

An Academic Program Coordinator keeps a degree program running between the decisions faculty make about it. The faculty set the curriculum and the director sets priorities. The coordinator turns those decisions into a published schedule, a set of accurate student records, a stack of processed petitions, and the reports that show the program did what its catalog says it does.

Penn State's job catalog gives a clear outline of the title. Its profile says the coordinator "collaborates with faculty, staff, and students within an academic unit or department to ensure the effective development and delivery of courses," responds to inquiries from current and prospective students, evaluates student and course data tied to degree requirements, monitors the program budget and plans orientations, receptions and workshops. The representative duties go further: preparing degree audits, forecasting course enrollment, processing grade changes and add/drop forms, managing scholarship and assistantship funds, and compiling enrollment and accreditation data for department leadership.

The title does not mean the same thing on every campus. At Penn State it sits in the support job family, with a supervisor level above it. Oregon State's Coordinator-Academic Program profile is an exempt, salary grade 5 position whose distinguishing feature is "the coordination and management of an academic program," including curriculum development, implementation, assessment and outreach. Read the classification, not just the title, to know which version of the job is on offer.

The work follows the academic calendar. Early in a term the inbox fills with registration problems, waitlists and late add requests. Mid-term brings schedule building for the next term, room requests and the first round of graduation checks. The end of the term is grades, degree clearance, commencement logistics and the reports that close out the year. Summer is when orientation is planned and accreditation files get caught up.

Faculty relationships shape the job. A coordinator has no authority over faculty and still needs syllabi by a deadline, teaching preferences before the schedule locks, and signatures on petitions. The coordinators who do this well build trust by being accurate and quick, and by explaining a registrar's rule before it becomes a problem.

Accreditation adds a compliance layer to the job. Programs reviewed by a programmatic accreditor, such as ABET for engineering or the Council on Social Work Education for social work, go through periodic reviews that ask the program for documented evidence that it meets the accreditor's standards. Someone has to keep that evidence organized between visits, and Penn State's profile puts accreditation data on the coordinator's list of reports for department leadership. Done well, the self-study starts from a folder that already exists instead of a scramble through old email.

Education. As a rough guide, a bachelor's degree is the usual starting credential for the professional version of the job, and a master's degree in higher education administration or student affairs can help for graduate program roles. Support-level classifications can set a lower floor: Penn State's senior-support Academic Program Coordinator profile lists an associate degree and 4+ years of relevant experience as its minimums, with an equivalent combination of education and experience accepted. A degree in the program's own field helps in professional programs such as nursing or social work, where the coordinator has to understand clinical placement or field education rules.

Experience. As a rough guide, people come to the job after two to four years in a related campus office. Typical starting points, as a rough guide:

• Administrative or staff assistant work in an academic department
• Admissions, registrar or financial aid front-line roles
• Graduate assistant positions that involved scheduling, events or student communications
• K-12 school office work, which builds the same calendar discipline and parent-facing communication

Systems. Expect to learn the campus stack on the job, but arrive comfortable with the categories:

• Student information systems: Ellucian Banner, Workday Student, Oracle PeopleSoft Campus Solutions
• Degree audit: Degree Works or a home-grown audit tool
• Learning management systems: Canvas, Blackboard, D2L Brightspace
• Room and event scheduling: 25Live
• Admissions CRM for programs that recruit directly: Slate, Salesforce
• Excel or Google Sheets for enrollment reports, with pivot tables and lookups at a minimum

Skills that separate strong candidates.

• Policy reading: the ability to read a catalog rule, a registrar memo or an accreditor standard and explain it in two plain sentences
• Record accuracy: one wrong degree audit can delay a graduation
• Faculty-facing tact: getting deadlines met by people the coordinator does not supervise
• Data handling: pulling clean enrollment and completion counts and knowing what each number means
• Event logistics: budgets, vendors, room setups and contingency plans

Career ladder. Penn State's catalog lays out one path inside the title family: Academic Program Coordinator at support levels, then supervisor, with related strings leading to Academic Program Specialist and Academic Program Manager. Other possible next steps include program director, assistant director of a graduate school, academic affairs or institutional research analyst, and enrollment management roles.

Certifications. No certification is required for the title. What a hiring committee can check instead is the record: clean audits, on-time schedules and orderly accreditation files.

BLS does not project employment for academic program coordinators as a separate group. The closest occupation in its projections, postsecondary education administrators, is projected to grow 2 percent from 2025 to 2035, which BLS describes as slower than the average for all occupations. BLS also projects about 14,500 openings a year on average for that occupation over the decade. Those figures cover the whole occupation, deans and provosts included, so read them as context for campus administration, not as a count of coordinator jobs.

Federal rules finalized in 2026 tie federal loan eligibility to program-level results. The Department of Education's Student Tuition and Transparency System (STATS) and Earnings Accountability final rule, published in the Federal Register on July 1, 2026 and effective July 1, 2027, applies an earnings test to all degree programs for the first time. Undergraduate degree programs are compared with working adults who hold only a high school diploma, and graduate programs with working adults who hold only a bachelor's degree. A program that fails the earnings premium measure in two out of three consecutive years loses Direct Loan eligibility. The rule implements Public Law 119-21, which the rule notes is also known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

For a coordinator, that rule matters because program-level data is the coordinator's daily material. Completion records, enrollment counts and graduate contact lists all feed the conversations a department will have about how its programs perform, and offices that already keep that data clean will have less catching up to do.

Accreditation is changing on a similar timeline. On October 29, 2026, the Department released its Accreditation, Innovation and Modernization (AIM) final rule, published in the Federal Register on October 30, which implements Executive Order 14279. The rule realigns accreditor recognition toward a greater focus on student achievement, strengthens the criteria an accrediting agency must meet to show it is fully separate and independent from any affiliated trade or membership organization, and removes regulatory barriers to institutions changing accrediting agencies or working with more than one. The rule takes effect July 1, 2027, and accrediting agencies may adopt its provisions early, beginning January 1, 2027. If a program's accreditor revises its standards or reporting under the new rule, the program's evidence files will need to follow.

AI tools have reached campus offices. In the fall 2025 survey the Association for Institutional Research ran with EDUCAUSE, NACUBO and CUPA-HR, 94% of respondents said they had used AI tools for work within the past six months, and 73% of recent users said they use them daily or weekly. Plausible uses for a coordinator include drafting routine student emails, summarizing policy documents and cleaning up enrollment spreadsheets. Judgment calls on petitions, accuracy of student records and faculty relationships stay with the person in the job.

The role also works as an entry point into higher education administration. Someone who has run a program's schedule, records and accreditation files has seen the whole operating model of an academic unit, which is useful preparation for program director, academic affairs and institutional research roles.

Dear Search Committee,

I am applying for the Academic Program Coordinator position in your Department of Public Health. For the past three years I have been the staff assistant for the undergraduate and certificate programs in our university's School of Nursing, and the job you describe matches the work I already do, with a wider scope.

Each term I build the draft course schedule for the program director, enter room requests and resolve conflicts with the registrar before the schedule goes live. I run degree audits for every student who applies to graduate, and last spring I caught two seniors who were missing a required statistics course in time for them to enroll in a summer section. I also process course substitutions and transfer credit petitions, and I wrote a one-page guide that faculty now use to explain the petition process to their advisees.

Our programs went through a full accreditation review last year. I organized the evidence folders, collected faculty CVs and assessment reports, and kept the site-visit schedule for the team. The reviewers asked for three additional documents during the visit, and we delivered all three within the hour because the files were already in order.

I am comfortable in Banner, Degree Works, Canvas and 25Live, and I build the enrollment spreadsheets our director uses for budget meetings. I hold a bachelor's degree in health sciences, which gives me a working understanding of the public health curriculum and its practicum requirements.

I would welcome the chance to bring that experience to your program and to support your faculty and students through the next accreditation cycle.

Sincerely,

[Your Name]