The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Postsecondary Success (PS) strategy seeks to transform colleges and universities to dramatically improve credential attainment and eradicate equity gaps for low income and students of color.
This Deputy Director will lead a team that is responsible for understanding how colleges and universities are transforming themselves (to dramatically improve their performance and eliminate student success gaps by race and income) and translate that understanding into useful tools, methods and resources. These resources, coupled with evidence-based student success practices emerging from other portfolios on this team, will then be used by networks of institutions pursuing similar journeys. The tools, methods and resources developed by partners in this leader’s investment portfolio may include new education and business models, approaches to continuous improvement on existing models and tools that facilitate institutions as they prepare, reflect, prioritize, act or monitor their transformation journey. To accomplish these goals, this individual will:
- Develop and implement a transparent process for: surfacing insights regarding institutional transformation processes and approaches that are yielding more equitable gains in student success; working with grantees and partners to translate these insights into tools, methods and resources; testing them to ensure rigorous evaluation of cost, performance, and other outcomes, and then making the information readily available to the field.
- Represent the foundation's work with a wide range of constituents from internal leadership to college presidents, administrators, and faculty to students to nonprofit leaders to policymakers to venture capitalists, CEOs, and entrepreneurs. Responsibilities with these groups include persuasion, pacification, delivering hard messages, negotiation, and collaboration.
- Manage people and hire the talent needed to achieve our goals. Ensure successful employee onboarding, communicate performance expectations, create goal alignment and integrate project and change management across the full Postsecondary Team. Provide and seek feedback, measure progress and manage accountability, support employee development, and recognize achievement and lessons learned
- As a member of the leadership team, help shape the Postsecondary Success team’s investment portfolio strategy.
- Deepen field-wide understanding of the institutional capacities and capabilities required to embark on a successful transformational journey and identify approaches to nurture these capacities across the higher education sector.
- Working closely with the Director, forecast higher education industry changes and determine the Foundation’s role in ensuring those changes can be harnessed (or mitigated) toward our objective of more equitable student success.
- Lead a team of Program Officers in developing and managing investments; review and approve investments, contracts, and reports.
- Orchestrate this team’s work with other portfolios on the Postsecondary Success team, as well as other teams across the Foundation.
- Support Foundation leadership learning (via institutional site visits and other trips) and provide thought leadership in the field (e.g., speeches, meetings).
- Balancing disciplined execution against strategic priorities and flexibility to pursue opportunities that emerge as the ed market evolves
- Executive Communication and relationship building- an effective and compelling advocate for the strategy internally and externally both with senior administrators and with faculty and students
- People leadership and management skills- building teams; cultivating individual and team capabilities; ensuring collaboration across teams
- Inclusive leadership – can cultivate a climate and culture that embraces innovation, inclusiveness, diversity of professional and lived experiences as well as intellectual diversity
- Research and Development lifecycles – i.e. translating insights into actionable tools, methods, and resources for others to use
- Defining clear objectives and plans; takes a systems and hypothesis driven perspective; balances logic with creativity
- Leading institutional change management approaches (both generally and with specific application in higher education)
- Synthesis—can distill broadly applicable themes into insights that hold promise for a diverse set of institutions
- Applied knowledge of education technology that can support broader institutional transformation efforts
- 10 years of experience working as a change agent in US higher education
- Understanding of the organization, culture, and trends in US higher education
- Experience with innovative education and business models that promise improved institutional and individual student performance strongly preferred