Academic Program Manager Job Description

An Academic Program Manager is the person accountable for whether a degree program actually runs. Faculty decide what students learn and the director or dean sets direction. The manager owns the machinery underneath: the staff who process applications and petitions, the schedule, the budget, the records and the data that leadership asks for every term.

This page also covers the title program manager for higher education, a sector-wide name for the same operational job. O*NET's job titles file, for example, lists a generic "Program Manager" title under General and Operations Managers and under Social and Community Service Managers, with no separate higher education entry, so the work is easier to describe than to classify.

Penn State's job catalog gives one of the clearest public outlines of the role. Its Academic Program Manager profile describes leadership for "an academic unit or portfolio of programs to include oversight of strategic planning, assessment, engagement, and compliance activities." The representative duties name the operational core: student experience, admission or selection processes, record procedures, and course scheduling and delivery logistics. They also ask the manager to evaluate "the value and feasibility of new delivery models" and to provide direction for marketing and engagement strategies.

People. What separates the manager level from coordinator work is supervision. At Penn State's manager level the role oversees a team of "typically 4 or more; no fewer than 2" full-time direct reports, who may be individual contributors or first-level supervisors. That means hiring, assigning work, evaluating performance and covering gaps when a coordinator leaves mid-cycle.

Money. The manager monitors and tracks the unit budget, and Penn State's profile notes the role may have final signature authority for its area. In practice that covers purchasing, student worker payroll, event costs and, where a program has outside funding, the restricted accounts and sponsor reports that come with it.

Data and evidence. Enrollment counts, retention, course demand and assessment results all pass through the manager's office. The manager turns them into the reports a dean reads before deciding how many sections to run, and into the files an accreditor asks for at review time.

Governance. A manager prepares the curriculum proposals and background documents that faculty committees act on, and then carries out what those committees approve. The skill is getting work finished on a calendar the manager does not fully control.

The setting changes the scale. In a professional school with online cohorts the job can look like running a small business unit. In a liberal arts department it may mean one manager, two coordinators and a chair. The shape of the work stays the same.

There is no license or required certification for this job. Hiring rests on a record of running academic operations and supervising people.

Education. As a rough guide, expect a bachelor's degree at minimum and a master's degree for many manager-level roles. Penn State's manager profile lists a master's degree as its minimum education and accepts an equivalent combination of education and experience. BLS lists a master's degree as the typical entry-level education for postsecondary education administrators as a whole. Useful fields include higher education administration, educational leadership, public administration, business and the discipline of the program itself.

Experience. The usual path runs through coordinator, adviser, registrar or department administrator jobs. Penn State's manager level asks for 8+ years of relevant experience, including 3+ years of supervisory experience, and its senior manager level asks for 10+ years. Treat those as one employer's markers rather than a national standard; other campuses set their own thresholds, and some weigh a strong record as a coordinator or department administrator more heavily than years served.

Systems. Managers work inside the student information system (Banner, PeopleSoft Campus Solutions or Workday Student), a degree audit tool such as DegreeWorks or uAchieve, the learning management system (Canvas, Blackboard, D2L Brightspace or Moodle) and the institution's financial and purchasing systems. Programs that recruit actively add a CRM such as Slate or Salesforce Education Cloud. Report building in Excel, Power BI or Tableau is part of the job, since deans and directors ask the program office for enrollment and course-demand figures.

Skills the job calls for:

• Supervising and developing staff, including hard conversations about performance
• Building and defending a budget, and reading monthly variance reports
• Writing clearly for deans, faculty committees, students and accreditors
• Running a multi-month project with dependencies across offices
• Reading federal and campus policy, from student privacy law to the institution's own academic regulations, catalog rules and grading policies
• Working through shared governance without trying to overrule faculty

Credentials worth considering. None is required. The Project Management Professional (PMP) from the Project Management Institute is one optional credential that fits the project side of the job. A graduate certificate in higher education administration is another option for someone moving in from outside academia, such as a project manager from health care or the corporate sector who wants to learn how accreditation, financial aid and faculty governance shape a program's calendar.

BLS does not project employment for academic program managers separately. The closest occupation in its projections is postsecondary education administrators, which counted 231,800 jobs in 2025. BLS projects an employment change of 4,100 jobs from 2025 to 2035 for that group, and it describes the occupation's 2 percent growth as slower than the average for all occupations. Those figures cover the whole occupation, from enrollment offices to provosts, so they set the context for campus administration rather than count manager jobs.

CUPA-HR's public summary of its higher education workforce surveys reports that median pay increases for administrators, professionals and staff exceeded the rate of inflation for the third consecutive year in 2025-26. The same summary says that after several years of historically high increases, administrators, professionals and faculty received 2025-26 increases typical of the years before the pandemic.

Budgets are the pressure point. In CUPA-HR's 2026 survey of chief human resources officers, budget constraints and economic uncertainty emerged as the greatest challenge facing campus HR leaders. For a program manager, that pressure can mean frozen positions, harder questions about low-enrollment sections and closer review of what each program costs. The figures a dean uses for those decisions are the ones the manager's office produces.

On AI, the same CHRO survey found that only 2% of respondents said AI had caused HR-specific roles to disappear. For program managers, the tasks AI tools can help with sit in the routine layer of the work: first drafts of student emails, meeting summaries, report narratives and data cleanup. Student education records fall under FERPA, whose regulations sit at 34 CFR Part 99, so a manager has to know which tools the campus has approved before putting any student data into them.

Next steps can include:

• Academic operations: senior program manager, director of academic operations or assistant dean for administration. Penn State's senior manager level, for example, leads a department or larger team and typically has final signature authority for its area.
• Enrollment and student success: director roles in enrollment management, advising or graduate admissions, where program-level data skills carry over and the audience becomes a whole college rather than one program.
• Online and continuing education: managing a portfolio of online or professional programs, which adds marketing, partner contracts and revenue targets to the job. The manager there may work with instructional designers, an outside marketing team and employer partners, and the weekly numbers shift toward applications, starts and revenue per cohort.

The skills can also carry over outside higher education, to training organizations, education nonprofits and workforce programs that combine staff supervision, budgets and outcomes reporting.

Dear Members of the Search Committee,

Please consider me for the Academic Program Manager role in the Graduate School of Public Health. For the past five years I have worked in the Department of Health Sciences at Lakeshore State University, first as graduate program coordinator and, since last fall, as acting operations lead for our MPH and two graduate certificates.

In that acting role I supervise two coordinators and a part-time records assistant. I rebuilt how we assign work during admissions season, so applications no longer stall when one person is out, and I introduced a short weekly check-in that has cut the number of student petitions waiting past our two-week target. I also manage the program's operating budget and the restricted account for a state-funded practicum grant, including the quarterly reports the sponsor requires.

Much of my work is data. I built the enrollment and course-demand report our chair now uses to set section counts, and I assembled the assessment evidence for our most recent accreditation self-study, working with six faculty members to map course outcomes to program competencies. When the department moved its degree audit rules into a new system, I led the cleanup of exceptions and trained staff on the new workflow.

I know the boundary between operations and academic decisions. My job has been to give faculty committees clean information and a realistic calendar, then to carry out what they decide. Your school's plan to launch an online executive MPH is the kind of build I want to manage, and I would bring both the staff leadership and the operational discipline it needs.

Thank you for your consideration. I would welcome the chance to discuss the role.

Sincerely, Jordan Ellis