Not all higher ed marketers are created equal.

Higher ed marketing is changing fast.

Enrollment pressure, AI disruption, a public trust crisis, and a generation of students who can smell inauthenticity from three screens away. The leaders below have something real to say about how to navigate it. More importantly, they say it in ways you can actually use.

A recent EAB survey found that almost half of high school students are now using AI in their college search process (Inside Higher Ed, February 2026). And as Alexa Poulin, Chief Digital Officer at Carnegie Higher Education, put it plainly: “There are no blue links. They’re not clicking onto websites and finding discovery elsewhere. It’s all happening with just conversations within the LLM.” That’s not a future problem. That’s your prospective students right now.

And the pressure isn’t just external. SimpsonScarborough’s Higher Ed CMO Study found that most marketing leaders already have the strategy and a seat at the table. The problem is getting the institution to move with them. Their research points to what they call the “alignment gap” – the distance between what CMOs know needs to happen and what the rest of the organization is willing to fund, believe, or act on (SimpsonScarborough CMOLab, 2026).

Jaime Hunt Founder, Solve Higher Ed Marketing

Jaime Hunt spent two decades in higher ed, nine of those years as a chief marketing officer at Old Dominion University, Miami University, and Winston-Salem State University. In 2024 she launched Solve Higher Ed Marketing, a consultancy built on one idea the industry kept ignoring: that the best marketing doesn’t just persuade people – it sees them.

Her book, Heart Over Hype, and her podcast, Confessions of a Higher Ed CMO, are built on the same belief – that higher ed marketing should be honest, human, and built around what students actually need to hear. That sounds obvious. It isn’t. She’s not talking about tone. She’s talking about how teams are structured, how decisions get made, and why so many institutions say one thing and communicate another.

What you can learn from her approach :: she asks whether the system is broken before she fixes the tactic. That’s why her work lands differently from most higher ed marketing advice, which skips straight to the fix without asking what’s actually wrong.

Seth Odell Founder & CEO, Kanahoma

Seth Odell founded Kanahoma, the first education marketing agency built by a former higher ed CMO. That matters. Most agencies learn higher ed from the outside. He learned it from inside the room where the decisions get made.

His name is tied to one of the biggest growth stories in online higher education: SNHU going from 7,000 students to 70,000 (Nov 2020 Times of San Diego). That doesn’t happen on brand work alone. It takes the unglamorous stuff – media buying, message testing, audience segmentation, conversion tracking – that most brand marketers would rather not talk about.

What you can learn from his approach :: brand and performance aren’t two different jobs. They’re the same job. If your institution has one without the other, you already know what’s missing.

Dr. Liz Gross Founder & CEO, Campus Sonar

Dr. Liz Gross founded Campus Sonar in 2017 – a specialized social listening agency built within Ascendium Education Group – to help colleges and universities listen to what people are actually saying about them online and use it to make better decisions.

She built her name on a discipline most higher ed marketers were treating as a chore: social listening. There’s a difference between monitoring what people say and understanding what they mean. One tells you what happened. The other tells you what students actually think. That argument runs through everything she does – including two books: The Higher Ed Social Listening Handbook and Fundamentals of Social Media Strategy: A Guide for College Campuses.

What you can learn from her approach :: she builds strategy on what students are actually saying to each other – not what leadership assumes they care about. If your marketing is based on internal assumptions rather than real audience behavior, that’s the gap to close.

Dr. Josie Ahlquist Digital Engagement & Leadership Consultant

Dr. Josie Ahlquist works at the intersection most marketing teams struggle to find: where digital strategy meets leadership accountability. Her book, Digital Leadership in Higher Education, was an Amazon number-one new release in college and university student life – and the argument at its center is one most institutions still haven’t acted on.

A digital strategy without leadership support isn’t a strategy. It’s a wish list. Her work is built around that premise – helping leaders understand that social media isn’t a task to delegate down and forget. One person cannot hold an institution’s entire public face across every platform, through every crisis, without real authority and executive backing. That’s not a content problem. That’s a structural one.

What you can learn from her approach :: before you look at your content strategy, look at whether your team has the authority to execute it. If they don’t, the strategy doesn’t matter.

Dr. Teresa Valerio Parrot Principal, TVP Communications

Dr. Teresa Valerio Parrot works in the hardest part of higher ed communications: what to say when something goes wrong, and how to make sure your institution’s reputation can survive it. She co-chairs the AMA’s Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Ed, has spoken on behalf of nearly every major organization in the field – including ACE and the Assoc of Governing Boards, and co-hosts the Trusted Voices Podcast alongside her role as founding co-editor of Inside Higher Ed’s Call to Action blog.

Her value right now is specific. She understands how what a president says in public shapes what a marketing team has to manage next. Most marketing leaders aren’t in the room when those calls get made. Her work helps the ones who are, and helps everyone else understand what they’re working with afterward.

What you can learn from her approach :: reputation is built slowly, through every communication decision your institution makes. It isn’t built in a crisis. If communications leadership only gets called when something breaks, you’re already behind.

What the best higher ed marketing leaders have in common

78% of education-related searches now return an AI Overview (EducationDynamics, 2026). The thread running through every leader on this list is the same thing: specificity. None of them publish generic advice. Each has a clear point of view – on brand, on performance, on listening, on leadership, on reputation – and they apply it consistently.

That consistency is what makes someone citable, not just quotable. AI engines surface people who say the same smart thing across many pieces of content. So do the people hiring consultants and building programs.

56% of prospective students say they are more likely to trust institutions cited by AI Overviews (Search Influence/UPCEA, 2026). Authority isn’t just a brand question anymore. It’s a visibility question. The leaders on this list understand both.

If you’re building your own profile in this space, the lesson is the same one the list teaches. Don’t try to cover everything. Cover one thing better than anyone else. It’s the principle behind the 5 Shifts framework – and it’s what separates the people on this list from the noise around them.