Associate Vice Provost for Student Success, Bentonville Institute of Technology

Art and Wellness Enterprises (AWE) is a professional services organization supporting non-profits founded by Alice Walton, including the Alice L. Walton Foundation, Alice L. Walton School of Medicine, Art Bridges Foundation, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Momentary, and Heartland Whole Health Institute.

Job Description:

Job Title: Associate Vice Provost for Student Success
Reports to: Provost and Chief Academic Officer
FLSA Classification: Exempt

Location: Bentonville, Arkansas (On-site)

About Bentonville Institute of Technology

Bentonville Institute of Technology (BIT) is a new higher education institution being developed in Bentonville, Arkansas to advance new models of STEM education and workforce development. The university is designed to deliver a flexible, experiential educational model that combines rigorous STEM instruction with an entrepreneurial and business-infused mindset.

The institution will focus on areas such as artificial intelligence, automation and robotics, mobility, health technology, energy systems, and entrepreneurship. Through strong partnerships with industry and regional organizations, the University aims to prepare students with practical, high-demand skills needed for the evolving knowledge economy.

The university will develop a distinctive educational model based on experiential learning, stackable credentials, flexible entry and exit pathways, and strong industry engagement. The University plans to enroll its first undergraduate class in 2029 and establish a new national model for innovative STEM higher education. Additional information about the university’s founding vision can be found here: https://www.bentonvilleinstitute.tech/

Initially, faculty and staff will be hired by Art and Wellness Enterprises and immersed in a broader ecosystem on the Crystal Bridges Campus for Art and Wellness, providing shared operational services and subject matter expertise, in close proximity to the Alice L. Walton School of Medicine (AWSOM). 

Founding Context

• BIT is being built without legacy departments or inherited student-success structures. That creates an unusual opportunity to design the student journey as one connected system rather than a series of organizational handoffs.
• The Associate Vice Provost helps build that system from the ground up.
• The university’s emerging K–12 strategy extends beyond recruitment. BIT is exploring relationships with schools and learning partners that can increase early exposure, strengthen student preparation, create opportunities to pilot project-based learning, and establish pathways into BIT. The intent is to build a connected ecosystem in which schools can become partners in experimentation, preparation, career exposure, and continuous improvement of BIT’s model.
• Student readiness is a material institutional priority. BIT will need an evidence-based approach to understanding incoming students’ preparation — including quantitative readiness and the broader capabilities required to thrive in an intensive, project-based environment — and to provide appropriate pathways and support where gaps exist.
• Founding-era reality: this leader will build before a full team or mature infrastructure exists. The Associate Vice Provost will personally develop school partnerships, design assessments, run pilots, analyze student data, work directly with students and educators, and establish operating practices while simultaneously defining the organization that will eventually scale the work.

• BIT is an AI-native institution — AI is woven into how the institution teaches, operates, and serves students. This leader helps shape responsible AI-enabled approaches to student assessment, advising, early intervention, personalized support, and institutional learning while ensuring that human judgment, privacy, transparency, and student well-being remain central.

About The Position

The Associate Vice Provost for Student Success builds the system that connects early talent development, student readiness and assessment, enrollment transition, and undergraduate success. Launching its first undergraduate cohort in Fall 2029, BIT is developing a business-infused, AI-enabled, project-based STEM education model in which students learn by building real solutions to real problems.

The Associate Vice Provost leads the development of BIT’s K–12 learning and talent pipeline, student-readiness and assessment strategy, and student-success architecture. The role works especially closely with the Vice President for Enrollment Management to create a coherent pathway from early awareness and preparation through application, enrollment, transition, persistence, and completion.

This is not a conventional student-affairs role. The Associate Vice Provost helps define how BIT identifies potential, understands readiness, supports students proactively, and measures whether students are developing the capabilities the university promises. The role connects academic leadership, enrollment, K–12 partnerships, assessment, advising, faculty, data, and student support around one objective: helping students become successful Builders of Intelligent Systems.

Success in this role requires strategic student-success leadership, sound judgment, adaptability, and the ability to personally develop partnerships, design assessments, and support students while building the systems, teams, and processes needed to support student readiness, persistence, and completion in a founding environment.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

K–12 Learning and Talent Pipeline

• Develop a coherent K–12 strategy that builds early BIT identity, student preparation, and long-term pathways into BIT while supporting the institution’s broader educational mission.
• Build substantive relationships with schools, educators, community organizations, and learning partners in Northwest Arkansas and beyond.
• Design and test early STEM exposure, project experiences, educator engagement, readiness programs, dual-enrollment or other pathway concepts as institutional approvals and capacity permit.
• Use K–12 partnerships as learning laboratories for BIT’s project-based model — generating evidence about pedagogy, student readiness, and the experiences that help students thrive.
• Coordinate closely with Enrollment so that K–12 engagement and recruitment reinforce one another without reducing K–12 relationships to a recruiting funnel.

Student Readiness and Assessment

• Develop BIT’s approach to assessing student readiness and potential, including academic preparation, quantitative readiness, problem solving, collaboration, communication, persistence, and capacity to thrive in project-based learning.
• Partner with the Vice President for Enrollment Management and academic leadership on the candidate-assessment framework, including the Candidate Challenge now in development, while preserving appropriate admissions authority and governance.
• Design diagnostic and readiness processes that identify where students are prepared to accelerate and where bridge experiences or additional support may be needed.
• Establish feedback loops so assessment evidence informs recruitment strategy, curriculum design, advising, faculty practice, and student-support investments.

Student Success Architecture

• Design the university’s founding model for academic advising, progress monitoring, mentoring, learning support, early intervention, retention, and completion.
• Create a proactive student-success model that identifies emerging challenges early and mobilizes appropriate human support rather than relying primarily on students to seek help after problems become acute.
• Partner with faculty and academic leadership to define expectations for student progress within BIT’s three-year, year-round academic model.
• Develop clear measures of student success and recommend Board- and leadership-level indicators for retention, academic progress, completion, and other outcomes as evidence and operating experience mature.
• Ensure student-success practices support high expectations while recognizing the importance of belonging, well-being, clarity, and sustained performance.

Assessment and Evidence of Capability

• Help define how BIT assesses whether students are developing the knowledge, skills, judgment, and integrated capabilities promised by the academic model — not simply accumulating credits.
• Partner with faculty to develop coherent approaches to evidence of capability across projects, studios, portfolios, assessments, and other learning experiences.
• Connect student-level evidence to institutional learning, continuous improvement, accreditation evidence, and decisions about curriculum and support.

Enrollment Partnership

• Serve as a close strategic counterpart to the Vice President for Enrollment Management across the pathway from K–12 awareness and preparation through application, transition, first-year success, retention, and completion.
• Jointly refine the founding student profile using evidence about which students thrive within BIT’s distinctive educational model.
• Coordinate school relationships, field intelligence, readiness initiatives, assessment practices, transition programming, and melt/retention strategies so prospective students experience a coherent pathway rather than organizational handoffs.

AI-Enabled Student Success and Data

• Help shape an AI-enabled student-success environment in which appropriate learning, engagement, assessment, project, and advising information can support more personalized and timely student experiences.
• Partner with technology, academic, and enrollment leaders on the emerging Student360 concept and related institutional data architecture.
• Pilot responsible uses of AI for advising support, pattern recognition, student communication, learning support, and institutional insight while maintaining human accountability for consequential decisions.
• Ensure privacy, consent, transparency, inclusive access, academic integrity, and responsible AI practices are designed into student-success systems from the beginning.

Founding Academic Leadership

• Contribute to curriculum design, academic policy, accreditation evidence, faculty discussions, institutional assessment, and broader academic strategy as a member of the founding academic leadership team.
• Translate student and K–12 evidence into recommendations about curriculum, academic support, institutional priorities, and resource allocation.
• Build the future student-success organization deliberately, adding people and infrastructure as responsibilities, evidence, and scale justify them.
• Model the founding culture: builder mindset, candor, collaboration, stewardship, thoughtful experimentation, and personal execution.

Team Leadership

• Provide clear leadership and direction, establishing expectations and priorities to support evolving needs and objectives.
• Lead, coach, and develop a high-performing team, fostering a culture of excellence, accountability, and growth.
• Promote continuous improvement, professional development, and collaboration to drive results and support organizational priorities.
• Support the recruitment, onboarding, and training of new team members to ensure alignment with organizational standards and practices.
• Monitor and manage team performance, providing ongoing feedback, coaching, and support to address performance needs and recognize achievements.
• Monitor team engagement and workload, addressing challenges proactively and professionally while encouraging recognition and support.
• Perform other duties and responsibilities as assigned to support evolving organizational needs.

Qualifications and Requirements

Education and Experience

• Master’s degree or equivalent advanced professional preparation in education, STEM, assessment, student success, learning sciences, higher education, or a related field. Doctoral or terminal degree in a relevant field preferred.
• 10–12+ years of progressively responsible professional experience in student success, academic leadership, assessment, K–12/higher-education partnerships, enrollment-adjacent work, or a combination of these areas.
• 7–9+ years of progressive leadership experience leading and developing teams, including direct responsibility for staff supervision, performance management, coaching, and professional development, including oversight of managers and senior-level leaders.
• Demonstrated ability to design and build programs, systems, or partnerships rather than solely administer mature operations.
• Experience in a founding, start-up, rapidly growing, or substantially redesigned educational environment preferred.
• Experience using evidence and data to understand student readiness, progress, or outcomes and to improve educational practice.
• Experience designing student assessment, readiness, advising, retention, academic-support, or evidence-of-learning systems preferred.
• Experience with project-based, competency-based, experiential, STEM-focused, or other nontraditional learning models preferred.
• Experience supporting accreditation, institutional assessment, or continuous-improvement processes preferred.
• Strong record of working across organizational boundaries with educators, students, families, faculty, enrollment professionals, and external partners.
• Experience spanning both K–12 and higher education, or building durable partnerships between the two preferred.
• Experience with dual enrollment, bridge programs, summer or pre-college programs, or other student pipeline initiatives preferred.

Skills and Abilities

• Working familiarity with current AI tools and demonstrated willingness to use AI responsibly in daily work and in the design of student-facing systems.

Competencies and Attributes

• Architect and operator — Able to design the system and personally do the early work.
• Student-centered — Believes strong support and high standards reinforce one another without lowering expectations.
• Builder mindset — Comfortable creating from a blank page, testing ideas, learning quickly, and improving them.
• Assessment-minded — Data-fluent; seeks evidence rather than relying on assumptions.
• Relationship builder — Builds exceptional relationships across K–12, higher education, families, community partners, and internal teams.
• Collaboration — Collaborative and low-ego; able to share ownership across academic and enrollment boundaries.
• Responsible AI use — Fluent, responsible user of AI tools and curious about how AI can improve learning and student support.
• Communication — Clear communicator who can translate complex educational ideas into practical action.
• Adaptability — Comfortable with ambiguity, incomplete information, and evolving institutional structures.
• Commitment — Personally committed to the success, growth, and well-being of students.

Physical Demands and Work Environment

The physical demands and work environment characteristics described here are representative of those required by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this position. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform these functions.

Physical Demands: In the work environment described, this position requires utilizing a computer and a telephone for prolonged periods of time, good hand-eye coordination, bending and stretching, and the physical stamina to lift and transport a minimum of 10 pounds. Visual acuity to review written materials is required for this job.

Work Environment: Work is performed on-site (Monday-Friday, 8 a.m.-5 p.m.) in a professional, climate-controlled office environment with standard office equipment, including computers, printers, and telephones. This role requires working in an open setting near colleagues. The noise level is typically low to moderate. The role also requires regular interaction with both the public and internal team members in a professional and courteous manner. Travel to schools, partner organizations, and other locations in support of K–12 engagement and student-success initiatives is required, including occasional overnight trips. A flexible schedule may be necessary to accommodate business needs, including occasional evening and weekend work hours.

About Art and Wellness Enterprises

Art and Wellness Enterprises (AWE) supports operating non-profits founded by Alice Walton, including the Alice L. Walton Foundation, Alice L. Walton School of Medicine, Art Bridges, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Momentary, and Heartland Whole Health Institute.

Art and Wellness Enterprises, LLC is an equal opportunity employer committed to building and maintaining a workplace that is free of discrimination and harassment of any kind. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, veteran status, or any other status protected by the laws or regulations in the locations where we operate. 

All offers of employment are contingent on successful completion (where permitted by state law) of a confidentiality agreement and background check. In addition, the employee must provide proper identification verifying eligibility to work in the United States.