Jen Wells, a Senior Program Officer on the Postsecondary team, is focused on making and guiding investments with organizations that are dedicated to eliminating race, ethnicity, and income as predictors of student success. Her focus in recent years has involved learning from colleges and universities doing this work and investing in developing and testing tools and resources designed for broad use across the higher ed sector. 

Her career has been dedicated to serving a variety of non-profit and for-profit organizations to refine strategies, re-organize operations and re-orient around the needs of members and customers. 

As a management consultant and senior practice leader, she led blended teams of clients and consultants through multiple, large scale customer facing process and technology re-engineering efforts. During her tenure leading Hitachi Consulting’s national Customer and Channel Solutions team she was accountable for addressing clients’ marketing, sales, and service issues by designing and supporting their shift to enhance customer retention and increase profitability. Her experience across industries including consumer products, online media, forest products, telecommunications and software. 

Prior to her consulting career, she served in an advertising and marketing agency role for non-profit clients as well as in exhibition planning at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 

For over 10 years, Jen was a board member for City Year Seattle/King County, an Americorps program designed to address the US high school dropout crisis. She is a Marshall Memorial Fellow, a policy and opinion leadership program sponsored by the German Marshall Fund of the United States. 

She has a BA, cum laude, from Wellesley College and an MBA from the University of Washington, Foster School of Business, where she was awarded the Dennis Dahl Award for Student Service.