Mastering the Undergrad Career: College Professors

“Facebook is a platform that has not been proven yet.”

Those were the exact words that my market research professor said to me when i asked her about the relevancy of social media in the world of market research. Oh and did I forget to mention that this was in 2015?

For obvious reasons, even back then as a college student, I was flabbergasted by the audacity of my professor’s claims. How can an established professional not think twice about her comment when discussing the relevancy of what is now one of the largest companies in the entire world (and quite possibly the harbinger of American democracy’s downfall) in the world of market research. And although hindsight is 20/20, I still remember her sentiment to this day, which brings me to my next point.

Marketing professors in college are f*cking awful.

Now don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of professors out there who strive to share their knowledge of the workforce to aspiring undergraduate students. Some find creative ways to showcase the class material while others focus on providing real-world scenarios and projects. However, time and time again, we have all had that marketing professor (or multiple) who just simply didn’t care about teaching. And you know what? That is just absolutely despicable, but don’t get me even started with the marketing material being taught. While college classrooms are discussing brand marketing and the value of the classic marketing funnel, the marketing profession has moved on to unit economics, data stacks, and mar-tech platforms. It’s as if universities are speaking English while the marketing profession is speaking Mandarin.

Thus, because of this prevailing issue in the system, there is no effective talent pipeline between universities and corporations for people to pursue a marketing career. For many people who venture into this profession, they’ve had to do one of the following:

• Learn on their own through online resources
• Get trained by a mentor during an internship or their first job out of college
• Go to a marketing agency to learn the ropes before transferring client-side

And as a result of that, for those who venture into the marketing world, many have to start their career off with low salaries whereas their counterparts in the other business professions (i.e. accounting, finance, investment banking, HR) get bankrolled right away. And while this may be the future for some in the short term, this is not sustainable in the long term. To fix universities, we need to create a hybrid system that is unique to the marketing field while also considering the fact that marketing professionals typically don’t go into education because of the lower salary:

• Require all marketing professors to involve local companies in the development of their curriculum — This will ensure that the curriculum gets a stamp of approval from the local business community.
• Reduce the significance of tests in a student’s grade and emphasize the use of projects in the final exam — It is understood as commonplace knowledge that if you want to test people on how good they are at memorizing, all you have to do is administer a test. But if you want to understand true comprehension, projects work better and also provide an opportunity for students to develop necessary soft skills.
• Require that every student gets an internship as a part of the marketing degree — Granted, this is much harder to implement. However, let me be clear that unlike the other major professions taught at the undergrad level, marketing is one of the few fields that can’t be learned from simply reading a book.
• Standardize the use of on-campus competitions to get students more interested in the marketing profession — Heard of startup weekend? Imagine a 3 day competition where marketing professionals mentor teams of 4 in a battle royale focused on a hypothetical product/campaign launch

With these simple guidelines, I believe that the marketing curriculum can be salvaged and finally upgraded to the 21st century. All it takes is a realization that marketing education does not have to be f*cking awful.