Guest Bio

Dr. Robert E. Anderson was appointed President of SHEEO on August 1, 2017. Anderson’s experience includes his most recent role as Interim Chief Academic Officer and Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs for the University System of Georgia. As a senior leader at USG, he addressed academic program approval, college completion initiatives, distance education, new delivery models, K-12 policy, teacher education, and grants administration and evaluation. Dr. Anderson helped restructure the system’s learning support paradigm, which resulted in significant completion gains within credit-bearing gateway courses.

Before his tenure at USG, Anderson served the West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission for seven years as Vice Chancellor for Policy and Planning and Executive Vice Chancellor for Administration. In these positions, he directed Academic Affairs, Fiscal Affairs, Legal Affairs, Financial Aid and WVNET, the state’s computing infrastructure unit, for both the 10-college four-year system and the 10-college community college system. Previously, he was an administrator and instructor at Montreat College in Montreat, North Carolina where he taught religion, worked closely with first-year students and college retention efforts. Dr. Anderson’s scholarly focus has been in the areas of student access and financial aid policy with a particular interest in merit aid programs and their impact on institutional and student outcomes. A native of Augusta, Georgia, he holds degrees from The Citadel (B.A.), The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (M.Div.), and The University of Georgia’s Institute of Higher Education (Ph.D.).