Higher Ed Marketing’s Next Role: Student Experience

Last week, one of our student care representatives walked a student to financial aid. He sat with her for 15 minutes and helped her figure out what was wrong with her account. A year ago, that same person did not have time to do this. He would have been on the phone all day answering the same five questions. Now, our AI chatbot handles all of those calls and inquiries, and 85 percent of inquiries get resolved without any escalation to a person. Chatbots are getting smarter across higher ed, and we’re seeing the impact firsthand.

So that representative had 15 minutes to be a human being with another human being.

AI gave us back hours! But it also exposed a gap that we’d unintentionally been ignoring: The student journey is split across departments that don’t always coordinate. Marketing owns the campaign. Advising owns the relationship. Or, for those of you who love a classic marcomm cliché, think of it like a funnel, where marketing owns the top of the funnel and advising owns the bottom. But the handoff between them? Nobody’s job. We know that students disappear in that space, and AI just made it impossible to pretend otherwise.

My higher ed prediction for 2026 isn’t about technology. The institutions that thrive will be the ones that understand what AI actually offers—not merely efficiency, but rather a chance to reorganize around the student instead of around departmental turf.

The org chart is already changing at some institutions, and I expect that change to accelerate. Marketing and enrollment are starting to report to the same person. Retention metrics are showing up on marketing dashboards. At some places, the CMO role is expanding toward something like chief experience officer. At others, the change is smaller but just as real: a standing meeting where marketing and student services look at the same data and solve problems together. However it happens, someone has to own the whole journey.

Here’s what that looks like in practice: At Forsyth Tech, a few times a month I’m in a meeting with student success services looking at the data. Say, for example, 12 students from the nursing program we just promoted didn’t show up for advising appointments. That’s my problem now, not just theirs. I leave that meeting owning what happens next, not just celebrating the enrollment numbers.

When we redesign a process or plan a campaign, we bring in people from every level of the college. This includes student care representatives, faculty members and always students themselves. They tell us things we’d never hear in a directors-only meeting: “We’re getting 50 calls a week about this financial aid form” or “Students keep asking about childcare; what are we going to do?” When those voices are in the room co-creating with you, you’re accountable to them.

When institutions start working this way, things start to shift.

Measurements change. Marketing departments still track applications and enrollments, but now they’re also watching the persistence rates by program and advising-appointment attendance. They’re looking at how many students actually use the resources being promoted. If retention drops in a program that received a marketing investment, it shows up on the dashboard as a marketing problem.

Marketing teams also begin fixing the problems they uncover. In the old structure, a disconnect between what a brochure promised and how the process actually worked often went unnoticed. Students would get stuck and leave quietly. Now when they can’t do what they were told they could, marketing can either fix the process or stop promising it.

I can already hear the pushback: Marketing departments are full of graphic designers, writers, web developers. Nobody hired them to build relationships with students. Are they supposed to change jobs now?

No. Designers still design. AI makes the production work faster, and that’s useful. But speed isn’t the point.

The point is what the department has bandwidth to care about. When marketing teams are buried in production, they measure output, campaigns launched, social posts scheduled. People hit their deadlines, report their numbers, move on. AI allows departments to get some of that time back and start asking different questions: Did the student experience match what was promised? What’s the advising team hearing that should change how the institution markets this program? Job descriptions don’t have to change. But the department’s attention can finally expand past the deadline.

At Forsyth Tech, marketing, recruitment, student care and onboarding all report to me now. Over the same period we made that shift, our graduation rate went from 19 percent to 45 percent. Minority completion went from 12 percent to 44 percent. I’m not claiming all the credit, because these results took campuswide transformation over years. But I know the way my teams work together is part of the story. AI freed up time. The structure made sure we spent it on students.

How do you start? You don’t have to blow up your org chart tomorrow. But you could:

• Start with a monthly meeting where marketing and student services sit together. Make it about solving problems, not giving updates. Ask where students are getting stuck and where your promises don’t match reality.
• Put retention on marketing’s scorecard alongside enrollments. See what changes when marketing has skin in what happens after the first day.
• Pick a program where enrollment is fine but completion is terrible. Have marketing and student services redesign it together. If that works, you’ve made the case for bigger changes.

Most institutions are using AI to do the same work faster inside the same silos. Marketing gets better at targeting. Student services gets better at triage. Everyone speeds up in their own lane, and nobody asks whether the lanes are the problem.

Most of us got into this work because we believed education changes lives. Somewhere along the line, that got buried under content calendars and click-through rates. AI can take the repetitive stuff. What matters is what you do with the time it gives back.