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You are here: Student Success Skills » Navigating College Practices » Understanding a University’s Administrative Structure

Student Success Skills

Understanding a University’s Administrative Structure

by jack
July 13, 2012

Universities can be bewildering bureaucracies. Organizational units may have titles that are not obvious. Outlined below are some organizational unit titles you might need to interact with:

  1. Bursar – This is the unit that produces you tuition bill.
  2. Student Accounts – This is the unit that keeps track of your payments, your scholarship deposits, your financial aid checks, etc.
  3. Provost – This is the top academic officer of the university. This person could also be called the Vice President of Academic Affairs.
  4. Dean – This is the top academic leader for a college. A college consists of a number of majors.
  5. Chair – This is the person who is the academic leader of a major or small group of majors
  6. Registrar – This is the unit that processes grades and maintains your official transcript.
  7. Student services – This is the overall administrative unit for a variety of student support functions such as student health, career services, housing, financial aid, counseling, etc.
  8. University Relations – This unit is responsible for promoting the university. This unit might also be called Institutional Advancement or Public Affairs.
  9. Disability Services – This unit supports students who have special needs (e.g. physical or learning disabilities). This unit could have a variety names and might be combined with other units.
  10. Admissions – This office deals with student recruitment and processing evaluations of applications.

Obviously a university has many more administrative units, but these are the ones that you are most likely to need. You might be wise to identify the names of those units on your campuses since titles of units vary from one university to another one..

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