Carolyn Jasper's documented formative years are associated with Long Island, New York, where she began undergraduate study at the Southampton campus of Long Island University in 1979. That campus was created to provide a liberal arts education to the residents of the East End of Long Island, and her studies there preceded her legal training in Massachusetts.
Jasper received a Bachelor of Arts from Long Island University's Southampton campus in 1983. Southampton College, the easternmost campus of Long Island University, opened in 1963 with a nationally recognized marine science program that produced an unprecedented number of Fulbright awards.
She then attended Harvard Law School, where she earned a Juris Doctor in 1989. Founded in 1817, Harvard Law School is the oldest law school in continuous operation in the United States, and its Cambridge, Massachusetts, setting placed her legal education within Harvard University. Jasper was admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1989, the same year she completed her law degree.
Jasper's first documented professional position was as a partner of S Eggeuno, a role dated to 1989. She was admitted to the Massachusetts bar in the same year.
From October 1989 to December 1992 she worked as an attorney at Ropes & Gray in Boston. The firm was founded in Boston in 1865 by John Codman Ropes and John Chipman Gray, both Harvard Law graduates, and by the 1960s it had grown to nearly 75 attorneys. It later expanded into an international practice with offices in the United States, Asia, and Europe.
Jasper later moved into nonprofit development. From March 2015 to June 2022 she served as Director of Development at Prudence Crandall Center, Inc., and in July 2022 she became its Chief Development Officer. The organization, founded in 1973 as the Prudence Crandall Center for Women and renamed in 2003, provides shelter, housing, and support services to survivors of domestic violence in New Britain, Connecticut. It is the oldest domestic violence program in Connecticut.
