AI Implementation · Higher Education · Equity
Kathleen Schoenecker
I build AI systems that work in the real world… where resources are constrained, regulations are complex, and the stakes belong to students who can’t afford to be experimented on.
01 — About
The gap between what policy intends and what implementation delivers is where I work.
I’m the Director of Financial Aid at Lemoore College in California’s Central Valley — and I’ve spent 20 years diagnosing the distance between how higher education systems are designed and how they actually function under real constraints. I’m now directing that same diagnostic lens at AI implementation, where the gap between model capability and institutional deployment is where the work actually lives.
02 – Projects
AI Projects
Custom GPT · Regulatory AI
FSA Handbook GPT
A custom AI assistant trained on verified Federal Student Aid publications to answer complex financial aid compliance questions. Designed to reduce staff research time on Title IV regulations while providing reliable, source-cited guidance, not hallucinated answers.
OpenAI GPT Builder · Retrieval-augmented · Title IV / HEA · Compliance
AI-Assisted Tool · Process Design
Special Circumstances Income Calculator
An AI-assisted workflow that generates audit-trail worksheets for professional judgment income adjustments… a high-stakes, high-volume compliance task that previously required hours of manual documentation per case.
Professional Judgment · Audit Trail · Process Automation
Vibe-Coded App · Product Direction
Building With AI: A Task Manager Experiment
An interactive HTML task dashboard with a JSON backend, built by directing Claude through iterative scoping, functionality, and design feedback… after recognizing that an agentic “AI Chief of Staff” could never get institutional approval, and scoping down to what would.
Vibe-Coding · Human-AI Collaboration · Scoped Implementation
Quantitative Research · Implementation Analysis
SSSP Implementation Study
Dissertation research using logistic regression across 7,729 students to identify which mandated support services actually predicted degree completion, and which ones, including orientation, produced null or negative effects.
Logistic Regression · SPSS · Equity Analysis · Ed.D. 2017
Governance · Organizational Design
College AI Work Group
Member of a 22-person cross-functional college AI work group and a 10-person district AI work group. Bridging the gap between faculty skepticism, administrative urgency, and the small number of staff who have actually built things with AI.
AI Governance · Change Management · Facilitation
03 – Writing
Writing
June 2026
Auditable by Design: What Financial Aid Compliance Taught Me About Trustworthy AI
Every professional judgment decision I make must be documented well enough to survive a federal audit. That constraint turns out to be an excellent design brief for responsible AI tools.
March 2026
The Upskilling Trap: Why Domain Experts Are the Real AI Advantage
A response to Hilary Gridley’s argument about who should be leading AI implementation, and why importing technical talent without institutional knowledge is a failure mode hiding in plain sight.
June 2026
Building With AI: A Task Manager Experiment
What happens when you can’t get IT approval for the AI tool you actually want? A look at scoping an ambitious idea down to one that survives real institutional constraints.
Coming soon
When Policy Intent Meets Implementation Reality: Lessons from SSSP for AI in Higher Ed
The California Student Success Act mandated services that, in practice, produced mixed and sometimes negative effects. AI adoption in higher education is following the same pattern, for the same structural reasons.
Let’s Talk Implementation.
Available for conversations about AI in higher education, vendor partnerships, and advisory work.