1. Rebecca Karoff joined the University of Texas System in February 2012 as Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic
Affairs. Her areas of responsibility include a number of student success initiatives and the implementation of the
Chancellor’s Texas Prospect Quantum Leap, focused on building bridges and unprecedented collaboration between the
State’s pre-K-12 educators and higher education.
With over 20 years working on public higher education at the system level, first in Wisconsin and now in Texas, she is
dedicated to utilizing the power of the post-secondary state system as a catalyst for quality educational attainment, innovation
and transformation in the 21st
-century global society.
Prior to joining the UT System, Dr. Karoff was Senior Special Assistant to the Senior Vice President for Academic and
Student Affairs at the University of Wisconsin System, where she utilized her extensive policy background to help drive
competency-based curricular delivery and reform through a number of collaborative system-wide initiatives, designed to
enhance student outcomes, success, and the metrics by which success is measured.
Dr. Karoff was the founder and director of LEAP Wisconsin, the UW System's Liberal Education initiative in partnership
with the Association of American Colleges & Universities (AAC&U). LEAP—Liberal Education and America’s Promise—
focuses on engaging the public with core questions about what really matters in college, connecting employers and
educational leaders to make the case for the importance of quality education in the global economy, and helping all students
achieve those learning outcomes essential to success in a diverse democracy. Wisconsin was the first LEAP State; Texas
became a LEAP State in 2014.
Since 2005, LEAP Wisconsin has functioned as the System’s quality agenda, centered on inclusive excellence as the driving
force for educational attainment. In collaboration with provosts, deans, faculty and instructional academic and student
support staff from throughout the UW System, Dr. Karoff worked to improve equitable student access, metrics and outcomes
relating to quality curricular and co-curricular educational experiences and high-impact practices. With AAC&U, she led a
number of grant-funded LEAP projects, including Give Students a Compass and Quality Collaboratives: Assessing and
Reporting Degree Qualifications Profile Competencies in the Context of Transfer. She was the project lead on AAC&U’s
newest Lumina Foundation-funded project, Faculty Collaboratives, designed to build faculty capacity in proficiency-based
reform initiatives focused on enhancing student learning. She also served as principal investigator on a Gates Foundation
State Systems Transformation grant to reposition developmental education in the UW System as a high-impact, student-
success practice.
In Wisconsin, Dr. Karoff served as Senior Advisor to the UW Flexible Option, the UW System’s competency-based
educational program. One of the early architects of UW Flex, she played a lead role beginning in 2012 in the planning and
development of this innovative program. She was lead author and principal investigator of a Lumina Foundation grant to
chronicle the development of UW Flex and identify alternative student success metrics appropriate to competency-based
education, on which she still serves as a PI. Additional work focused on the Flex Quality Profile, an evaluation framework
for ensuring the quality of UW Flex, and developing a new model for competency-based transcription. She served on the
Advisory Board of the Center for the Study of Distance Education and Technological Advancement (DETA) at the
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Fund for the Improvement of
Postsecondary Education (FIPSE).
Prior to Fall 2012, Dr. Karoff served as Special Assistant to the Senior Vice President for Academic and Student Affairs,
with primary responsibilities as secretary to the Board of Regents Education Committee and staff liaison to the UW System
Provosts for eleven years. In her first role at UW System, she worked in the Office of Professional and Instructional
Development and, since that time, has worked consistently to integrate high-quality professional and instructional
development into the educational attainment and grant projects she has led.
A native of Massachusetts, Dr. Karoff moved to Wisconsin to pursue graduate study in Comparative Literature.
Before joining the UW System Administration, Dr. Karoff taught Comparative Literature at UW-Madison, from which she
received Ph.D. and M.A. degrees. She earned a B.A. with Honors from Brown University. She and her husband, Brad, are
the parents of two mostly grown children.
Revised February 2016