You Ask, I Answer: College Degree for Marketing Success?

In today's episode, Mark asks, Do you need a college degree to succeed in marketing? Well, like any profession, you know, success in marketing is going to be a combination of uh your academic knowledge, understanding the theory, the frameworks, all the pieces, uh, and combining that with practical application. There are plenty of people who have great theoretical background and can't do anything. There are plenty of people who have uh hardworking skills but have to reinvent the wheel constantly because they don't have the the academic knowledge to essentially take proven shortcuts to make processes run better. How you obtain that combination of academic knowledge and practical experience is up to you.

Uh a lot of people, the vast majority of people in marketing go the college route, where they take some form of higher education, uh, whether it be a bachelor's degree, master's degree, post uh baccalaure certificate, all these different things to get the academic knowledge and then enter the workforce. Now, here's the catch to the employer that is a results-only uh work environment. Your academic background matters substantially less than can you get the job done? Can you deliver the results? But for the average hiring manager, for the average HR person, for the uh HR systems that are in place that have algorithm screening candidates, uh a higher education of some form is a heuristic.

It is a uh single data point that it's easy to make a snap judgment on, and that snap judgment allows the person or more and more the system to shortcut, right? To say, okay, this person has this academic background, they move into the the viable candidate pool. This person does not. And the challenge with a lot of these HRIS systems is that you don't really get a chance to make your case because the system has already screened you out, right? You have already been removed from consideration and you don't know why, right?

You don't necessarily see that because none of the HRIS systems out there will spit out a here's why you were rejected, right? You would have to follow up with the company and maybe get an answer from them, but they themselves may not necessarily know why the system did or did not choose you. And if you check out the major vendors in HR, many of them use very sophisticated uh systems and algorithms for screening candidates to make candidate selection easier, particularly in an environment like we have right now, recording this in the tail end of 2020, where you have many, many more candidates than you do job openings, right? And so you will post up a job opening and get three, four, five hundred uh candidates, and the average HR manager does not have the time to do that uh for you know the ten or fifteen or twenty job openings they have, so the system will do the screening up front, thus having that degree uh does satisfy the system requirements, whether or not you're any good or anything. I mean, heck, we all know people that we went to college with who were intellectually not as gifted, right?

Um, who or maybe didn't work quite so hard as they should have, unless uh you count drinking heavily is working hard. But at the end of the day, like the the old uh joke goes, what do you call the uh person who graduated last in their uh in their medical school class? You call them doctor, right? The per the person out there in marketing who has the degree, even if they're they got by with a 61, right? They are still they still have a college degree.

And in a system that is automated that it looks at a very black and white comparison, degree, no degree, that person still gets the nod, even if they're completely incompetent. Uh more progressive firms will definitely put things like or equivalent years of experience in their job ads. They will say, like you know a four-year degree or equivalent experience. So you have to be able to demonstrate in those um ads that you do have the replacement experience for the college education. Um, and that can be a little bit tricky.

But more than anything, when you are you look at the the candidate pool overall and you look at um what's out there, you can see that there is a very strong bias in marketing to have some form of high higher education. So let's bring up this data. So this is the data from uh here we are. This is the data from uh the iPads, integrated post acad post-secondary education data system from the U.S. Department of Education.

These are for college degrees in marketing, um, the percentage share of of people out there and what kind of education they have. So we see that the bachelor's degree uh forms 84.95% of all the postsecondary uh of all the educational status out there. Um that is that consists of 40,000 people per year that has gone up substantially since 2011. Um crank this out. This data only goes to 2017 uh because the Department of Education does lag uh fairly substantially in their data collection.

And we can see that other outcomes, master's degree, less than one year post-secondary certificate, etc. Um, form substantially smaller amounts. If you combine a bachelor's degree and a master's degree here, 85% and almost 7%, that's 92-ish percent of people in marketing have some kind of higher education degree. When we look at the non-higher education degrees, we have an associate's degree, which comprises about now three and a half percent, and you can see that's been on a sharp decline since 2013. And one to two year post-secondary uh education uh certificates, which are essentially non uh the candidate pool there, the number of people is very, very small.

Right. So what we see is that there is a very strong bias in the marketing profession for people to have that uh that substantial post-secondary education. Do you need it to be successful? It depends. Um if you're planning on working in a larger corporation, you're planning on working um in a in a larger agency, you probably do need it, right?

Uh you probably do need it because you're gonna get screened out if not. If you work at a smaller agency or you know, a startup or things like that, probably not you won't need it as much, right? Because those hiring processes tend to be more personal, they tend to be not as automated, um, and you have the ability to uh at least plead your case, right, before a hiring manager. Uh, I remember when I went to go work um at uh my first startup in the early 2000s, you know, the hiring process was uh come in and sit in this shabby little office and uh and and just talk through the things that they had going on, and it was a great opportunity to be able to explain my background. Um I do have a higher education degree, uh, but it was not relevant to marketing.

And be able to explain how that degree translated or could translate into success for the organization. And uh it it it did actually um a few years later. But the point being you have to find uh the type of company that is willing to accept a non-traditional background, right? A non-traditional background where uh you don't have what the system is looking for. If you want to work within the system, the the bigger stuff out there, you need the degree.

There are other things that uh a college degree can bring, and some people do uh experience things like alumni networks and being able to to uh reach out to people who have that common experience. I've never had to use that. Um my networking has always been digital in the the wonderful world that we live in, but there are some people that they rely heavily on that, and so that is a benefit potentially um that you could realize from a college education. So, in short, there's no conclusive answer as to whether you need a college degree. Does it help you succeed?

Yes. Right? Does it help you pass muster from increasingly automated systems? Yes. Um does it preclude you from success if you don't have one?

No, but it makes things harder, right? It makes things more difficult. So should you go get one? Here's the big question: what is the return on investment, right? If if you go to say, you know, a state school or you do uh two years at a community college and finish off your last two years at a at a state school and you can uh graduate with little or no debt, the answer is yes, it is worth it because you will there are there is a clear um correlation between uh level of educational attainment and financial outcome, right?

There is that is without question. Um if you go and get and get a bachelor's degree and you come out with a quarter million dollars in debt, is that worth it? That is much less clear, right? In the long run, yes, but it makes for a very, very difficult time. So um if you can be savvy and get the education at a very low cost, then by all means do so, right?

Um another option for a lot of uh folks to consider, uh less so during a pandemic, but um, is getting higher educational attainment overseas somewhere at a at a non-American university. For if we're talking about America here, which uh has been my background, uh there are plenty of countries that offer uh very good education, even for non-citizens, uh at substantially lower costs, and at the end of the day, you still have a degree, and the degree is no better or worse than the degree from a college in the United States you've never heard of, but it checks the box on what the system is requiring. So that may be something to consider as well. Uh looking for where can you get a decent education um at a much lower cost. So the ROI of a college degree is less clear what with tuition and costs being what they are.

Um have a whole lot more to say on this because that used to be my profession for about uh seven years, but save that for another time. Do you need a degree? No. Does it help? Yes.

Uh should you get one? Only if you can make it cost effective. Only if you can get a strong ROI by not graduating with a ton of debt. If you have follow-up questions, leave them in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter.

We'll talk to you soon. Take care. Want help solving your company's data analytics and digital marketing problems? Visit trustinsights.ai today and let us know how we can help you.