Alex Kappus brings over 15 years of leadership experience in higher education, serving in a variety of institutional contexts in four different states and in several student development functional areas including residence life, new student and family programs, financial aid, leadership development, and student success. He currently serves as the Account Executive for Student Success with Credo Higher Education Consulting where he champions student success through the firm’s signature student retention initiative Moving the Needle. In his previous role as Senior Director for Student Success at NC State, he served on the university’s Pack the Polls Coalition, where he and his colleagues proposed, designed, and launched the 2022 Civic Education Challenge, a campus-wide effort to champion civic engagement.

A devoted scholar-practitioner, Alex’s research and scholarly writing focus on college students' nonpartisan political engagement and assessment of programs and services in higher education. His dissertation examined the lived experiences of college students involved in nonpartisan political engagement through the Campus Vote Project (campusvoteproject.org) during the 2020 election season. His expertise in nonpartisan political engagement in higher education is particularly relevant to advancing civic engagement which is increasingly scrutinized as a partisan political issue instead of one core to the civic mission of colleges and universities. He received a Ph.D. in Higher, Adult, and Lifelong Education from Michigan State University, an M.Ed. in College Student Affairs Administration from the University of Georgia, and a B.A. in Political Science from Emory University.