Higher Ed Pulse

The Alignment Gap: Beyond The Org Chart — Pt 3: How Much Is Misalignment Costing Your Campus?
What's the price of a recruitment promise your institution can't deliver? A program closure nobody told marketing about? A strategic plan that sends your brand campaign back to the drawing board?
In this Part 3 of The Alignment Gap, Jenny Petty trades her podcast host hat for a game-show host hat and challenges three higher ed marketing leaders to play The Price Is Wrong. Leah Wong of Gustavus Adolphus College, Russell Yost of the University of San Diego, and Graham Garner of Valencia College compete to guess the cost of common campus missteps, from lost tuition revenue to reputational damage.
Along the way, they explore the difference between making a difficult decision and avoiding one, share their own alignment confessions, and offer practical ways to bring campus leaders together before the next expensive mistake.
Because when institutions aren't aligned, someone always pays the price.
Get Your Own the Alignment Index™
How aligned is your institution, and where might disconnected decisions be costing you?
Explore SimpsonScarborough's Alignment Index™, a framework for understanding and addressing the gaps between institutional priorities, teams, and execution.

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Connect With Our Host:
Mallory Willsea
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mallorywillsea/
https://twitter.com/mallorywillsea
About The Enrollify Podcast Network:
The Higher Ed Pulse is a part of the Enrollify Podcast Network. If you like this podcast, chances are you’ll like other Enrollify shows too!
Enrollify is made possible by Element451 — The AI Workforce Platform for Higher Ed. Learn more at element451.com.

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Today's episode revisits Mallory's recent keynote from the 2026 AI Engage Fall Summit, “The Invisible Applicant.” During the keynote, Mallory argues that students decide before schools can see them as AI shifts discovery into the search answer layer and shrinks response windows. Through stories of Jen, Mark, and Maya, plus research on declining clicks, rising AI search use, and stealth applicants, it outlines four moves: show up in AI answers, defend brand beyond attribution, maintain one complete source-of-truth program page, and use automation for speed while placing humans where decisions get hard.
Watch the full session: https://youtu.be/ahJufRycvZY

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Connect With Our Host:
Mallory Willsea
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mallorywillsea/
https://twitter.com/mallorywillsea
About The Enrollify Podcast Network:
The Higher Ed Pulse is a part of the Enrollify Podcast Network. If you like this podcast, chances are you’ll like other Enrollify shows too!
Enrollify is made possible by Element451 — The AI Workforce Platform for Higher Ed. Learn more at element451.com.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Back on Episode 1, Dr. Marcus Collins talked about culture as the real operating system of an organization. On this Episode 2, we ask how you actually measure it. Jenny Petty moves to the guest seat, and Dayana Kibilds takes over the mic to ask about the Alignment Index, the tool Jenny built after years of hearing that “we’re overwhelmed” never changed anything on campus.
So far, no institution has scored Aligned. Human Load, the cost of people absorbing work the system should carry, scores lowest everywhere, and half of institutions name it as their biggest gap. Jenny explains how the index fits inside a full org assessment, why the org chart comes last, and where a CMO can start: one small, messy intersection where decisions collide.
Are you a CMO? Take the free Alignment Index and see how your team scores. Then join CoLab, SimpsonScarborough’s community for higher ed marketing leaders to watch the replay of our aggregate results.



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Connect With Our Host:
Mallory Willsea
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mallorywillsea/
https://twitter.com/mallorywillsea
About The Enrollify Podcast Network:
The Higher Ed Pulse is a part of the Enrollify Podcast Network. If you like this podcast, chances are you’ll like other Enrollify shows too!
Enrollify is made possible by Element451 — The AI Workforce Platform for Higher Ed. Learn more at element451.com.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Mallory speaks with Amber Kennedy, Executive Director for Content & Strategy at William & Mary, about the gap in college communications with parents post-enrollment. While institutions heavily court parents during recruitment, communications often fragment once students enroll. The discussion covers how modern digital expectations, safety alerts, and commencement messaging highlight the need for cohesive parent communication strategies that balance student independence with family inclusion.

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Connect With Our Host:
Mallory Willsea
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mallorywillsea/
https://twitter.com/mallorywillsea
About The Enrollify Podcast Network:
The Higher Ed Pulse is a part of the Enrollify Podcast Network. If you like this podcast, chances are you’ll like other Enrollify shows too!
Enrollify is made possible by Element451 — The AI Workforce Platform for Higher Ed. Learn more at element451.com.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to the debut episode of this new Pulse Check series, The Alignment Gap: Beyond The Org Chart.
This is Part 1: Why Culture, Not Structure, Is The Real Operating System. Host Jenny Petty is joined by Dr. Marcus Collins, Michigan Ross professor and author of For the Culture and the upcoming Good Soil.
We open the series with a history lesson that reframes everything: the org chart wasn't born in a boardroom. It was invented after a 1940s train collision in Massachusetts, drawn to fix a communication breakdown between crews sharing the same track — and it looked nothing like the pyramid we use today. It was a tree, built bottom-up from the people doing the work. Somewhere along the way we inverted it, and now we default to structure first, hoping strategy falls out of it — backwards from what the research actually tells us: structure should follow strategy, not stand in for it.
From there, Dr. Collins takes the conversation somewhere more interesting than reporting lines. Using the language of theater — "front stage" and "backstage" — he makes the case that culture is the real operating system underneath any org chart, and that misalignment happens the moment what an institution says (front stage) outpaces what it actually practices (backstage). We talk about what it looks like when that gap closes almost entirely, what belief has to do with segmentation and brand strength, and why a CMO with no authority over HR, budget, or academic affairs isn't powerless — because leadership, done right, is influence without authority. It's a conversation that starts with a train wreck and ends with a working definition of what alignment actually requires: shared belief, demonstrated consistently, from the top down.
What we cover:
The real origin of the org chart — and how a communication fix became a symbol of control
"Structure follows strategy": why most institutions do it in reverse
Front stage vs. backstage: how culture becomes the tell when belief and behavior don't match
Belief as the actual unit of alignment — and why segmentation, brand strength, and trust all trace back to it
Leading without authority: why a CMO's job is influence and inspiration, not control
Purchase Dr. Marcus Collins’ new book, Good Soil here: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/marcus-collins/good-soil/9781668662199/

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Connect With Our Host:
Mallory Willsea
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mallorywillsea/
https://twitter.com/mallorywillsea
About The Enrollify Podcast Network:
The Higher Ed Pulse is a part of the Enrollify Podcast Network. If you like this podcast, chances are you’ll like other Enrollify shows too!
Enrollify is made possible by Element451 — The AI Workforce Platform for Higher Ed. Learn more at element451.com.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.