Higher Ed’s Alignment Gap: Enterprise Expectations Without Enterprise Design
For more than a decade, SimpsonScarborough’s Higher Ed CMO Study has captured the lived reality of the most senior marketing leaders in higher education. Across ten years of data, one pattern has become impossible to ignore: a widening gap between what institutions expect marketing to deliver and how it is structurally supported to do so. That gap now defines the moment we’re in. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
The Alignment Gap
The “seat at the table” era is over. Marketing has the seat. The system never followed.
Over the past decade, CMOs gained titles, reporting lines, and proximity to leadership. Many now sit on the cabinet, report directly to the president, and are asked to weigh in on the institution’s most consequential decisions. (Hooray!)
And yet, the outcomes many institutions want still feel harder to achieve.
That’s because the challenge higher education is facing is no longer about access or ambition. It’s about alignment.
Higher education has always been decentralized. Silos are not new.
What is new is that marketing is now being asked to operate as an enterprise function without being designed, empowered, governed, or funded like one.
CMOs are asked to steward reputation, manage crises, drive enrollment, contribute to revenue, support advancement, expand audiences, modernize digital experience, and interpret market signals for leadership.
These are enterprise-level expectations.
And in many places, marketing is already doing this work, in practice and in pockets.
But the institutional systems surrounding marketing have not evolved at the same pace.
Enterprise expectations, legacy design
This year’s CMOStudy makes the disconnect unmistakable.
Budgets remain distributed without a shared strategy.
Measurement stays campaign-based while leadership asks reputational and enterprise-level questions.
Growth ambitions expand across audiences without a unifying framework.
Marketing is left to reconcile priorities, timelines, and tradeoffs it did not design.
We are calling this the Alignment Gap:
“The growing distance between what institutions expect marketing to deliver and how marketing is structurally supported to deliver it.”
What does this mean for CMOs?
In this gap, the role of the CMO has quietly transformed.
Today’s CMO is not just a brand leader or growth driver. They are an institutional connector and sense-maker, translating between fragmented units, competing priorities, and enterprise expectations.
They are expected to tell compelling stories about the institution while managing unresolved internal tensions. To connect dots across enrollment, advancement, academics, and leadership without clear authority over the systems that create coherence.
It’s exhausting. And it’s unsustainable without change.
Why is this moment different?
What’s new is not decentralization.
What’s new is that fragmentation has become normalized at the same time expectations have become enterprise-wide.
Admissions-controlled media spend ranges dramatically across institutions, often exceeding central marketing investment. Distributed marketers report through a patchwork of dotted lines, if at all. Data systems remain siloed. Shared measurement is rare.
In effect, institutions are asking marketing to function as connective tissue without building the connective infrastructure that makes coherence possible.
Over time, this creates Alignment Debt.
Like any debt, it compounds quietly. It shows up as slower decisions, duplicated effort, inconsistent signals to the market, and mounting pressure on teams to make disconnected parts work anyway.
This is not a marketing maturity problem.
It’s an institutional design failure.
What closing the Alignment Gap actually requires
This year’s Higher Ed CMO Study is about understanding how institutions can actually close the Alignment Gap.
Because alignment doesn’t break in one place, and it doesn’t get fixed in one move.
Across three chapters, we explore the structural conditions that most directly shape marketing’s ability to operate at the enterprise level institutions now expect:
Chapter 1: Budget & Staffing
How resourcing, authority, and organizational design enable or constrain enterprise outcomes.
Chapter 2: Growth Ambitions
How institutions pursue growth across audiences, and what happens when ambition outpaces alignment.
Chapter 3: Measurement
How institutions attempt to measure reputation and long-term impact, and where current systems fall short.
Together, these chapters surface the patterns, pressures, and tradeoffs shaping marketing’s role today, and point toward a clearer path forward for institutions ready to bridge the Alignment Gap.
Go deeper
Sign up below to receive invitations to our upcoming webinars that cover all 3 chapters of the Higher Ed CMO Study and gain access to the full data, frameworks, and tools designed to help institutions close the Alignment Gap.
