How Do Deans Get Their Marketing Experience?

Rowan University has an opening for the dean of its College of Professional and Continuing Education. The position description says:

The Dean of CPCE is responsible for developing, marketing, and delivering nontraditional educational programs to regional, national, and international populations currently not served or under-served by Rowan University. In addition, this person will be responsible for oversight of professional graduate education at Rowan with particular focus on marketing and supporting the development of innovative, interdisciplinary programs.

Now, to be a dean, you usually need a doctoral degree in some field of study relevant to your discipline, like mechanical engineering. (Rowan’s current dean has his Ph.D. in this field.) You also need to have some teaching experience and be well published in your field. This is all par for the course. But, at many colleges, you also need marketing experience. Again, Rowan’s job posting:

* Understanding of and successful experience marketing graduate and undergraduate programs. A working knowledge of the Mid-Atlantic market would be particularly attractive.

How do deans get their marketing experience? It’s safe to say that most of deans don’t study marketing as undergraduates, but even if they did, how much do they retain by the time they finish their Ph.D.s? And being that their Ph.D.s are in highly narrowed fields of study, when do they have time to study marketing? Further, deans are also required to have teaching experience, usually in their field of study. So when and how do they get their marketing experience? In most cases, the answer is that at some point in their academic careers someone handed them a marketing budget and told them to spend it.

I’ve noticed that when this happens, three things occur: 1) a proliferation of unused brochures, 2) more “marketing people”—who also have no marketing experience—are hired to do the work, and 3) marketing consultants are employed to create publications and ad campaigns, with little direction from their clients.

There are certainly exceptions to the rule, but for the most part, deans have no marketing experience and no education in marketing. Still, this doesn’t prevent them from being hired to oversee the marketing of their programs, in addition to handling their academic responsibilities.

I’m not a fan of the decentralized model of marketing for this very reason. No one can be competent to the degree they should be to do both well and it’s inefficient to have people handle tasks they’re not prepared to handle. Adam Smith figured this out a long time ago in his book, “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations” (1776). He described the solution as the “division of labor.” For higher education, the solution is to let the deans hire faculty and develop curriculum and let the marketing and admissions people recruit the students. But, for whatever reason, this concept has not been accepted at many universities, which is one reason why they continue to be inefficient and ineffective in their marketing efforts.