Alexander attended the Marist School, where he was a classmate of actor and television presenter Bert Parks, and graduated from Boys High School in Atlanta. He enrolled in 1936 at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he spent one year before transferring to Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, where he served as managing editor of The Yale Record,Alexander, Cecil A. (May–June, 2004) "The Pranks of Yesteryear". The Harvard Magazine. Cambridge: Harvard. the campus humor magazine, and received a bachelor's degree in architecture in 1940. He continued graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1946, following his military service in World War II, he enrolled in the graduate architecture program and earned his master's degree at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he studied with Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus school, which was a major influence on the development of modern architecture.
