When I first arrived on the community college scene, I saw what too many of us still encounter across the sector: a marketing function that was reactive, stuck in a service mindset, buried in production requests, and often told what to make and how to make it. Strategy wasn’t part of the conversation. The idea of marketing helping to lead change? Not even on the radar.
Fast forward to today—our team is a modern, strategic, award-winning marketing unit. We drive conversations around enrollment, brand, partnerships, and audience engagement. But here’s the truth: we didn’t get here by playing it safe. We got here because I wasn’t afraid to break things.
And frankly, community colleges need more of that mindset right now.
As a CMO with experience spanning community colleges, university flagships, Fortune 100, startups, and national thought leadership circles in higher ed marketing—I’ve seen how fast strategy, audience expectations, and partnership models are evolving. Community colleges cannot afford to lag behind.
You Can’t Market Your Way Out of a Broken Process
One of the hardest lessons for higher ed marketers is this: you can’t “pretty up” a bad experience. You can’t redesign the viewbook or launch a flashy campaign and expect transformational results if the onboarding process is broken, the partnerships are stale, and internal silos are choking innovation.
I’ve spent a lot of time pushing on these edges—not always comfortably. But if we want marketing to be more than the “copy shop” of the campus, we have to step into the spaces where strategy is being shaped (or where it should be shaped). And when those spaces don’t exist, we have to build them.
Partnerships That Actually Move the Needle
Too often, “partnership” in higher ed amounts to shared logos on a flyer. Real partnerships—the kind that expand reach, build new pipelines, and create community value—require us to think differently:
- How can we bring in employers earlier, not just for placement, but for program co-design?
- How can we engage with community-based organizations to reach learners we’ve historically missed?
- How can we partner across colleges in ways that defy the old turf battles and better serve our region?
These are marketing conversations as much as they are academic or workforce ones. And marketing leaders should be at that table.
A Culture That Supports Innovation
I’ll be candid: at many colleges, internal culture makes this hard. Risk aversion runs deep. “That’s not how we do it here” is still a default mindset. In my own work, I’ve faced plenty of resistance—from silos that protect old ways of doing things, from colleagues uncomfortable with transparency and accountability, and from leadership layers that struggle to embrace marketing as a strategic driver.
But here’s what I also know: when you consistently show results, when you tell the right stories internally and externally, and when you build coalitions of forward-thinking colleagues, you can shift the culture. I’ve seen it happen.
The Moment We’re In
Community colleges are facing a moment that demands reinvention:
- The student pipeline is different.
- The labor market is evolving faster than our curriculum cycles.
- The public conversation about higher ed value is changing.
We can’t meet this moment by recycling the same old strategies. We need marketing leaders who are willing to question, experiment, partner in new ways, and yes—sometimes break things that no longer serve us.
I’ll keep pushing in that direction. I hope more of my peers will too. Our colleges—and the learners and communities we serve—deserve nothing less.