higher-education
(50)
Melissa Pippine Built a Marketing Career by Listening Before Speaking
Before she became Watermark’s chief marketing officer, Melissa Pippine spent years close to products, customers and the untidy systems between them. Her career makes a quiet argument: good marketing begins long before the campaign.
Kevin Rockmael Has Spent a Career Marketing the Thing Education Cannot Buy: Trust
Across Kaplan, Guild, Sounding Board and now Proctorio, the fractional CMO has kept returning to one difficult brief: make institutions more useful, more credible and more open to the people they routinely overlook.
Ashley Safranski Put Career Services at the Center of the Campus Story
After years of hearing families ask what college would lead to, Ashley Safranski built a career around helping institutions answer - with clearer stories, useful data, and career support students can actually find.
Jason Archer Keeps Building Places Where People Feel Known
He built an online graduate program around human connection. Now Baker Hill's chief marketing officer is applying the same instinct to the decidedly less sentimental machinery of lending technology.
John Fillmore Is Betting the Degree Needs a Workshop
After a decade helping Chegg scale, John Fillmore returned to the oldest problem in higher education: how to make a classroom feel more like the work waiting outside it.
Nikhil Sinha's Long Game: Turning Distance Into Infrastructure
A communication scholar became a university builder, an online-learning executive and a startup ecosystem operator. Across each reinvention, Nikhil Sinha has kept working on the same stubborn problem: how to give ambitious people access to the networks that make ambition useful.
Melvin Hines Built a Company Around the Students Higher Ed Forgets
Only 68 students from his high-school class of 250 reached graduation. Hines turned that number into a 13-year operating thesis: support should arrive before a student has to ask.
Justin Dagen Spent 15 Years Learning Why Doors Fail - Then He Made Them Read the Calendar
A pinball-playing software engineer found a stubborn campus problem hiding between two databases. The company he built to solve it now sits inside SwiftConnect, translating schedules into millions of quiet decisions at the door.
Mitch Gordon Put Freshman Year on a Passport
A teaching job in Taiwan became a career in global education. Now Verto Education's co-founder is trying to turn a semester abroad from an elective into the opening chapter of college.
Diego Fanara Turned a Lonely University Choice Into a Global Conversation
A teenager arrived in London with rankings, brochures and too few honest answers. Diego Fanara built Unibuddy so the next student could ask someone who had actually been there.
Carey Cook Took the Long Road to the High Road
After 28 years shaping student life, an Idaho educator traded the campus office for payroll, benefits and workers' comp - then merged his young company into a larger regional platform without giving up its local brief.
Jonathan Clues Took the Racing Line Into Higher Ed
A British racing champion learned that the laps were only a fraction of the job. The rest - sponsorship, storytelling and earning attention - became the operating system for StudentBridge.
Leah McTiernan Spent Decades Studying Attention. Now She Is Building a University Brand.
The research veteran behind IBU's marketing has moved from measuring what people notice to shaping what students can believe in - with curiosity, evidence and operational discipline as her through-line.
Adrian Ebscins Bet on Attention Before It Became Everyone's Business
A biochemistry graduate turned radio host turned B2B operator, Adrian Ebscins has spent his career translating complicated systems into stories people can act on. His latest assignment brings that habit to small-business banking at Relay.
Davina Chan Markets a Place You Have to Experience
At Hart House, the product is not one program or one room. Davina Chan's job is to make a century-old institution feel legible, useful and open to the next student walking through the door.
Max Simon Put Cannabis on the Course Catalog
A consultant told him cannabis education should not exist. A decade later, Max Simon is building credentials with dozens of colleges and a hiring network designed to turn knowledge into work.
The Teacher Who Kept Marketing to Teachers
He taught eighth grade for nine years and was named Teacher of the Year. Then he spent the next two decades convincing the world's biggest education brands to market like they still remembered the classroom.
Melanie Kaloski
Melanie Kaloski is the Chief Marketing Officer of the Hispanic Scholarship Fund (HSF), the nation's largest nonprofit supporting Hispanic American higher education. A brand-builder by training, she spent more than a decade shaping consumer brands at Capital Group's American Funds, Nestle and Beachbody before turning her marketing craft toward mission work - helping Latino students and families find the resources to earn a college degree. She holds a B.A. from Amherst College and an MBA from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, and is fluent in French.
Edwin van Rest
Edwin van Rest is the co-founder and CEO of Studyportals, the Eindhoven-based platform that helps students compare study programs across borders. He started the company in 2007 with two engineering friends after his own year abroad in Japan showed him how hard it was to find information about international study options. Today Studyportals lists hundreds of thousands of programs, reaches millions of students a month, and van Rest is a recognized voice in international education, a former EAIE Rising Star Award winner, and chair of the EAIE Marketing & Recruitment Expert Community.
John Eielson
John Eielson is co-CEO and co-founder of FlatWorld, a Boston-based digital-first publisher that sells college textbooks for roughly $25 to $40 to make higher education more affordable. A former U.S. Coast Guard officer turned strategy consultant, he and longtime business partner Alastair Adam acquired the assets of Flat World Knowledge in 2016 and rebuilt it around a simple idea: instructors matter, and quality and affordability do not have to be a tradeoff. Today FlatWorld's titles are used by professors at more than 2,000 colleges and universities.
Joshua Richards
Joshua Richards is the Chief Executive Officer of Boundless Learning, a Boston-based online program management and edtech company spun out of Pearson. He rose to the top job in January 2025 after serving as the company's Chief Product and Technology Officer and helping steer its transition into a standalone business. With more than two decades in technology and education, Richards leads a company serving roughly 17,000 learners across 150+ countries and having launched more than 450 online programs, focused on driving learner success through personalization and helping universities and institutions reach new audiences.
Matt Kennedy
Matt Kennedy is co-founder and CEO of Mantra Health, a New York-based digital mental health company that partners with over 150 college and university campuses to deliver telepsychiatry, teletherapy and campus-wide wellness programs to more than 1.3 million students. He moved from COO to CEO in 2023, and leads a team of roughly 130 employees and 100+ in-house clinicians.
Megan Dusenbery
Megan Dusenbery is the Chief Executive Officer of Knack, a student success platform that helps colleges run paid peer tutoring programs. Appointed in October 2025 alongside the company's Series B led by New Markets Venture Partners, she succeeded founder Samyr Qureshi, who moved to executive chairman. She spent nearly two decades building higher-ed partnerships at Kaplan (rising to Senior Vice President of Higher Education) and at ACUE, where she was Chief Partnerships Officer before taking the Knack job.
Richard Scannell
Richard Scannell is the CEO of Lambent (formerly Armored Things), a Boston-based SaaS company that turns Wi-Fi signals and building sensors into anonymous occupancy analytics for corporate and university campuses. He took over in July 2022 as the company pivoted from securing sports venues to helping facilities managers argue with executives about whether Tuesday is really the new Monday. Before Lambent he co-founded Glasshouse Technologies, which grew to more than $100 million in revenue, and led RiverMeadow Software and Login VSI's North American operations.
Joseph E. Aoun
Joseph E. Aoun is the seventh president of Northeastern University and the author of Robot-Proof, the book that named the AI-era reinvention of higher education. A Lebanese-born linguist trained under Noam Chomsky, he has spent nearly two decades turning a single Boston commuter campus into a 13-campus global university system spanning North America and the UK, expanding co-op placements into more than 140 countries and growing external research funding sevenfold.
Joshua Broggi
Joshua Broggi is the founder and CEO of Woolf, a software-powered collegiate university that lets qualified organizations launch accredited, globally recognized degree programs in weeks. A former Faculty of Philosophy member at the University of Oxford and a Humboldt Fellow, he is rebuilding the plumbing of higher education from the API up.
Saurabh Gupta
Saurabh Gupta is the CEO and co-founder of Edorer, an AI-powered education platform on a mission to internationalize universities and give students academic freedom to move across institutions, pick courses online or on-campus, and earn stackable credentials. An IIT Kanpur engineer with a Harvard credential, he calls himself a 'Higher Ed rebel' and is building CredX, a blockchain-based global credits exchange. Before Edorer he founded or co-founded TalentGrids (acquired), Talent For Work, Campus to Corporate, and serves on the board of the World Assessment Council, which supports over 100,000 educators worldwide.
Todd Zipper
Todd Zipper is a longtime education-and-technology operator now running Axio Education, a Scottsdale-based agentic AI learning platform that turns static coursework into adaptive, personalized pathways. Before Axio he spent more than two decades building and scaling online-education businesses: he led The Learning House to its 2018 sale to Wiley, then ran Wiley's global education and talent operations as an executive vice president overseeing more than $300 million in annual revenue. He hosts the higher-ed podcast An Educated Guest and holds a CFA charter alongside degrees from Penn and Columbia.
Will Geiger
Will Geiger is the cofounder and CEO of Scholarships360, a free platform that helps students find and win scholarships to pay for college. A first-generation college graduate himself, he spent nearly a decade inside the admissions machine - reading more than 10,000 applications as a Senior Assistant Director of Admissions at Kenyon College, running its merit scholarship program, and counseling teenagers through the college maze at Hopkins School - before teaming up with his brother Brian to rebuild the broken scholarship search from scratch. Scholarships360 raised a $250,000 seed round in 2021 and now reaches students nationwide with vetted scholarships and personalized financial aid guidance.
Alastair Adam
Alastair Adam is the co-founder and Co-CEO of FlatWorld, the Boston-based publisher on a mission to bring US college textbook prices back down to earth. A Cambridge-trained lawyer who started in London M&A, he spent two decades advising the information and publishing world before buying the assets of the old Flat World Knowledge in 2016 and rebuilding it. Today FlatWorld's peer-reviewed, low-cost titles are used by faculty at well over 1,500 North American institutions. He also chairs the board of PLOS, the nonprofit open-science publisher.