Executive Director 

Nicole Farmer Hurd, Ph.D. is the Founder and Executive Director of the National College Advising Corps, a consortium of 17 partner college/universities across the US that hires and trains recent college graduates to serve as college advisers.  These advisers are placed into disadvantaged communities to work with low-income, first-generation college students to raise college matriculation rates.   

A leader and passionate advocate of post-secondary education, Dr. Hurd served as an Assistant Dean and Director of the Center for Undergraduate Excellence at the University of Virginia.  While there, she founded the College Guide Program, which received not only national attention but also a $10 million grant from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation to expand the program into ten additional states.  The College Guide program served as the model for the Advising Corps.  Because of the growth and success of the College Guides program, Dr. Hurd was awarded the Governor of Virginia’s Award for Volunteerism and Community Service in 2007.

While at Virginia, Dr. Hurd worked with successful Rhodes, Marshall, Mitchell, Fulbright, and Truman Scholar candidates and led the first university-wide Office of Undergraduate Research.  During that time she also taught in the Department of Religious Studies.  In 2007, she was the Faculty Award Recipient for the University of Virginia’s Raven Society, the university’s oldest and most prestigious honorary society.

 Dr. Hurd remains active in higher education, serving as a Clinical Assistant Professor of Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and lectures widely to both students and educators on college access and advising.  She is a co-author of “Helping Students Navigate the Path to College: What High Schools Can Do”, a publication of the US Department of Education.  Dr. Hurd was recently selected as a 2011 American Marshall Memorial Fellow.

She holds a PhD in Religious Studies from the University of Virginia, a Master’s degree from Georgetown University, and a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Notre Dame.

She and her husband, Bill, reside in Chapel Hill and have two children, Monica (9) and Matthew (7).