Student Affairs Coordinator Job Description

A Student Affairs Coordinator keeps one office in a college's student affairs division running from week to week. This is the staff member who opens the case file, books the room, answers a parent's email within the limits of privacy law, and makes sure a student referred by three different offices does not get three different answers. Some campuses post the same job as a student services coordinator or as a coordinator in the dean of students office, and the exact portfolio depends on which unit owns the position.

Conduct and casework

In a dean of students or student conduct office, the coordinator handles the front end of the conduct process. Referrals arrive from resident assistants, campus police, faculty and other students. The coordinator logs each one in the office's case management system (Maxient is one platform built for this work), sends notice letters, sets up meetings with a hearing officer, and tracks sanctions such as reflection papers, educational workshops or probation until the file closes. Careful files matter, because an appeals board, an attorney or a federal investigator may read them later.

Records and privacy

The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) governs student education records, and its regulations spell out what rights exist for a parent or eligible student to inspect and review them. A coordinator who handles conduct files, care-team notes and program rosters checks who is asking and on what authority before sharing anything, and routes unusual requests to the registrar or general counsel instead of guessing.

Programs and logistics

Away from casework, the role runs a calendar: orientation sessions, leadership workshops, family weekend and welcome events. The work is concrete. Rooms go through 25Live or a similar scheduler, catering and performer contracts go through purchasing, promotion goes out through the campus events calendar and social accounts, and an assessment survey follows each event so the office can report what students got from it. The coordinator may also hire and supervise the student workers and graduate assistants who staff the front desk.

Care and referral

When a faculty member worries about a student who has stopped attending class, the report may land with the dean of students office. The coordinator logs the referral for the care or behavioral intervention team, checks whether other offices have already reached out, and schedules contact. The coordinator is not the counselor; the job is to get the student to the counselor, the financial aid officer or the housing staff member who can act, and to confirm the hand-off happened.

Where the job sits

The coordinator reports to an assistant director or director and works beside academic advisors, counselors, residence life staff and financial aid officers. A Student Affairs Administrator or director on the same campus manages an entire unit, its staff and its budget; the coordinator carries out the daily work inside that unit and may be the first named person a student meets there.

Education

For the occupation BLS treats as the nearest match, educational, guidance, and career counselors and advisors, the Occupational Outlook Handbook lists a master's degree as the typical entry-level education. That figure covers licensed K-12 school counselors as well as campus staff, so it describes the whole occupation rather than this title. As a rough guide, coordinators come to the job with a bachelor's degree and some campus work experience, or directly from a master's program in higher education administration, student affairs or college student personnel. Coursework in student development theory, law and policy in higher education, and assessment maps closely onto the daily work.

Experience that transfers

As a rough guide, one to three years of student-facing campus work is a reasonable starting point. Useful backgrounds include:

• Graduate assistantships in housing, orientation, student activities or student conduct
• Undergraduate resident assistant, orientation leader or student government roles
• Front-line jobs in admissions, advising or financial aid, where a candidate learns the student information system and the referral map of a campus
• Program work at a nonprofit that served college-age students, especially if it involved case notes or confidential records

Training and credentials

Training that coordinators pursue includes:

• Mental Health First Aid, certified through the National Council for Mental Wellbeing, for recognizing and responding to a student in distress
• QPR Gatekeeper Training from the QPR Institute, a suicide prevention course built around question, persuade and refer
• Title IX training from ATIXA (the Association of Title IX Administrators), useful for coordinators whose intake work may touch sex-based harassment reports
• Campus security authority training from the institution's own Clery compliance office

Systems

• Student information systems: Ellucian Banner, Oracle PeopleSoft Campus Solutions, Workday Student
• Conduct and care-team case management: Maxient
• Student success and early-alert platforms: EAB Navigate
• Event and room scheduling: 25Live
• Assessment surveys: Qualtrics or a campus survey tool

Skills that separate strong candidates

• Plain, neutral writing for notice and outcome letters that may be read in an appeal
• Steady judgment with an upset student or parent, without promising what the office cannot deliver
• Case discipline: every contact logged the same day, every hand-off confirmed
• Comfort saying no to a records request and explaining why

BLS does not project employment for student affairs coordinators as a group. The nearest occupation, school and career counselors and advisors, is projected to grow 3 percent from 2025 to 2035, about as fast as the average for all occupations, with about 27,800 openings a year on average over the decade. The occupation held about 389,500 jobs in 2025. Those counts include K-12 school counselors and college career staff along with student services roles, so read them as context for the field, not as a count of coordinator jobs.

Pay by campus type

The band on this page uses the BLS row for that occupation in colleges, universities and professional schools. In junior colleges, the same occupation's May 2025 median was $59,770. Across all industries, elementary and secondary schools included, the occupation's national median was $64,330 in May 2025. Base pay is only part of an offer: candidates comparing jobs should check the institution's pay grade for the title, whether the post is exempt or hourly, and whether evening and weekend event work is compensated.

Title IX: the rule in force

Coordinators who write intake forms and handbook language need to cite the Title IX rule actually in force. The 2024 Title IX rule was vacated in full in final appealable orders in two different courts on January 9, 2025, and February 19, 2025. On January 31, 2025, the Department of Education announced it would enforce the regulations that existed before the 2024 rule. On September 29, 2026, the department published a final rule, effective that day, that repeals the 2024 rule and restores the regulatory text that existed prior to the 2024 rulemaking. Offices that drafted materials around the 2024 rule have reason to recheck them against the recodified text.

Hazing reporting

The Stop Campus Hazing Act, an amendment to the Clery Act, added new duties for colleges. According to the Clery Center, colleges must publish biannually a transparency report of officially recognized student organizations found responsible for hazing. The first Campus Hazing Transparency Report was required to be published by December 23, 2025. Institutions must also provide campus-wide hazing prevention programs informed by research. For a conduct or student organizations coordinator, that turns hazing findings into data that must be recorded consistently enough to publish.

What steadies a coordinator's prospects

Federal rules on Title IX, Clery reporting and hazing each produce records and reports that student affairs offices keep. A coordinator who can show clean case files, on-time letters and reports a director can hand to auditors has evidence that travels from one campus to the next.

Dear Search Committee,

I am applying for the Student Affairs Coordinator position in your Office of the Dean of Students. I finished my master's degree in higher education administration this spring, and for the two years before that I held a graduate assistantship in a student conduct office, where I handled intake for conduct referrals, drafted notice and outcome letters, and kept case files current in Maxient.

The part of that assistantship I valued most was the intake desk. Referrals came from resident assistants, campus police and faculty, often with incomplete details, and my job was to turn each one into a clean file a hearing officer could act on. I built a short checklist for incoming reports, asked our office manager to review it, and trained the two undergraduate assistants who covered the desk in the afternoons. Our director began using the checklist in training for new hearing officers.

I also coordinated our office's part of fall orientation: booking rooms, scheduling the conduct and community standards session for each orientation group, and collecting feedback afterward so we could tighten the presentation for the next term. That work taught me how much of student affairs depends on logistics done well before anyone notices them.

I have completed Mental Health First Aid and my campus's training for campus security authorities, and I am comfortable in Banner and Navigate. I understand that this role serves as a liaison to housing, counseling and financial aid, and I enjoy that kind of coordination: knowing who can solve a problem and making sure the student actually reaches them.

Thank you for considering my application. I would welcome the chance to talk about how I could support your office.

Sincerely,

[Your Name]