Practice area
Student success is an operations problem before it is a technology problem.
I help institutions and the vendors who serve them turn retention strategy into systems that actually run — the workflows, data and adoption work that sits between a good plan and a measurable outcome.
Seventeen years inside a public research university, then four years building platforms on the vendor side. I have sat in both chairs.
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4
enterprise student-success and CRM platforms directed — programs, budgets, contracts, configuration and adoption
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283
stakeholder groups served across historically siloed units
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17
years at Texas Tech, ending as Senior Director for Student Success & Retention
How I work with institutions
Retention diagnostics
Where students actually fall out, what your data can and cannot tell you, and which interventions are worth the staff time. I built the dashboards for reenrollment, faculty alerts and predictive signals — and learned which ones people actually opened.
Selection & implementation
Choosing, configuring and actually landing the platforms that carry advising, engagement and case management — including the adoption work most rollouts skip. I have run these implementations and I have been the customer vendors had to satisfy.
Integration & data plumbing
The unglamorous middle: getting your SIS, CRM and success platform to agree about who a student is. Identity resolution, assignment logic, and the transformations nobody budgeted for.
Track record
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2014 – 2022
A university-wide retention initiative, from infancy
Coordinated the Provost’s Task Force on Student Success & Retention across four working groups — interventions, assessment, advising, and the analysis and technology ecosystem. Texas Tech subsequently reached record highs in retention and graduation, with senior leadership attributing a direct contribution to the work.
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2020 – 2022
The engine I built during a hiring freeze
A pandemic hiring freeze left the department without a programmer, so I taught myself PHP and MySQL and built the advisor assignment engine myself: Banner data cleaned and transformed through stored procedures, driving automated assignment of students to advisors and support staff in the success platform. Deliberately vendor-agnostic — it would survive a platform change with only a schema mapping.
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2006 – 2022
AXIS — an advising CRM, and its open-source life
Sixteen years stewarding an advising management system through the institutional version and an open-source release. Alongside it: enterprise implementations of a student success collaborative platform, a retention platform, and a visual schedule builder — each with the leadership, end-user and vendor coordination that decides whether a rollout takes.
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2016
A regional symposium, convened
Brought regional leadership, faculty, enrollment and student affairs teams together in Lubbock, with the state Commissioner of Higher Education among the keynotes. Institutions were asked to send mixed teams — executives, analysts, front-line advisors — on the theory that innovation needs deliberate hierarchical disruption to happen at all.
I have been the buyer vendors had to convince, and the builder shipping the roadmap.
That is an unusual pair, and it is most of what I bring. I know which vendor promises survive contact with an advising office, because I made some of them survive and watched others fail.
Higher education is one branch.
The same work runs through enterprise SaaS platforms, governance and compliance systems, and AI-orchestrated delivery.