SimpsonScarborough’s Higher Ed CMO Study

The definitive benchmark of marketing leadership in higher education, grounded in insights from more than 250 institutions and over a decade of research.

For more than ten years, SimpsonScarborough’s Higher Ed CMO Study has captured the lived reality of the most senior marketing leaders in higher education. This year’s findings reveal a persistent and widening alignment gap between what institutions expect marketing to deliver and how marketing is structurally enabled to do that work.

As marketing becomes an enterprise growth function, success now depends less on ambition and more on alignment across budgets, staffing, growth priorities, and measurement.