Only 46 Programs Left to Investigate

I spent all day yesterday and all morning today looking up the marketing PhD programs on the AMA web site, which has been a long and sort of mind-numbing experience. My total list was 88 schools, some of which I had already examined pretty thoroughly. The factors I looked at in this investigation were:

• Faculty research interests
• Background of current students
• Whether a masters degree is required as a prereq
• Whether (and how many) general business courses would be required as part of the program for those without an MBA
• Other prerequisites (like specific math or econ coursework)
• Average GMAT scores of accepted students
• Specific coursework in the program

I was able to eliminate 42 schools as follows:

• No faculty with compatible interests (16)
• Must have masters degree (7)
• Entire program in an area that I don't care for - e.g. supply chain management (5)
• Too econ/math focused (4)
• Location - NYC, Alabama, Mississippi (4)
• No PhD in marketing (4)
• Requires make up of 30 hours of business coursework without MBA (1)
• Could not get a handle on faculty interests at all (1)

Of course, I will need to do a lot more pruning to get 46 down to a reasonable number to apply to, but it's a start.

Remember that when I performed a similar analysis of social psychology PhD programs, I only came up with 16 that had faculty working in a compatible research area, with a survival rate of 19%. My survival rate for marketing programs is 52%. Which only goes to emphasize the degree to which research that attracts me has shifted from psychology to marketing. I have found more professors working in the area of attitude change in marketing departments than psychology departments, for instance. It was a kind of odd but nice experience realizing the degree to which my interests are totally mainstream in marketing.

So I am basically coming to the decision that I should apply exclusively or primarily to marketing programs rather than psychology ones. My reading on the topic has already brought me fairly far down this road, but I am now seriously considering just not bothering with psychology programs at all. I'm finding it difficult to see the upside to a psychology program, even if I could get in to a halfway decent one and eventually be so lucky as to get an academic position in a psychology department.

There is an online Q&A session later this month, hosted by a consortium of business schools, to try to convince people like me that we should apply to marketing PhD programs. I'll be curious to hear what they have to say.

There is a funny contradiction between what these business schools say and what they do. They are really getting out there with the message that there is a shortage of qualified applicants for academic jobs in business schools and hence, the job market is wide open for someone who wants to be a marketing professor. But it's not as if they don't have many dozens to hundreds of people applying for each slot in PhD programs.

The big problem is that demand for marketing professors is increasing (as more people seek undergrad and MBA degrees in the subject) while the business schools themselves are decreasing the total number of PhD students they enroll and decreasing the percentage of PhD students who are US citizens (and are thus more likely to stay in the US to teach rather than go back to India, China, or wherever to work for the people who paid for the PhD to begin with). And since business PhD students are very expensive for universities - we require much higher stipends than other students (because the opportunity cost of school is much greater for somebody who qualifies for a business program compared to your typical French literature or biology candidate, I assume) and to do it right requires keeping faculty-student ratios at 1:1 - they (as a group) quail at the idea of spending yet more money, to produce yet more PhDs who take jobs in industry or overseas and consider (as an individual business school) that they don't want to spend money to produce a professor for a competing university.

Of course, there is nothing stopping them (so far as I know, other than the fact that it goes against absolutely everything academia has been about in this country and would be basically impossible for people to accept and a nightmare to implement and manage) from offering "extra" positions in the program to people who are willing to commit to stay at the university for some period of time post-graduation to teach. What am I saying - that wouldn't work at all given that even if all the other issues could be resolved, universities always want to hire faculty who got their PhDs at a more prestigious program than their own; their own graduates would not be good enough for them, unless they happen to be #1.

But to end on a more amusing note (since this blog has been low on amusing lately with long-winded discussions of poorly-designed research studies and other stuff that results from my finding it more efficient to re-purpose school-related work into blog posts than come up with something new): I enjoyed these two things encountered during my review of business school websites.

#1: In one professor's profile, he was reported as having been characterized in a very glowing way as a marketer by Lubricant World. But this didn't turn out to be nearly as exciting, impressive, or sexy as it might originally have seemed.

#2: One professor (an older, grey-haired guy) concluded his profile by writing: "Significant personal failures include never really learning to speak Spanish or play the guitar, among others too numerous to list."