Monday, Nov 27, 2017
by Robert Leitner ’17
Rider University's College of Business Administration was recently ranked as one of the top five best colleges for marketing majors in New Jersey by Zippia, a career search website.
The report identified the state’s best colleges for marketing by using data from the National Center for Education Statistics and College Scorecard data from ED.gov. The criteria they used to rank the colleges were career results, marketing emphasis and school performance.
Using this criterion, the report determined Rider's marketing program was among the top programs in New Jersey, offering some of the best career opportunities.
Two Rider faculty members, Dr. Anubha Mishra and Dr. Larry Newman, recently revised the marketing curriculum to keep students at the forefront of current marketing practices.
Rider’s marketing program is included in the College of Business Administration’s Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) accreditation, a distinction of exceptional quality that less than 5% of the world’s business schools hold. Mishra and Newman began the revising process by benchmarking Rider's marketing curriculum with about 20 other AACSB institutions.
"We embarked on a mission to confirm that our curriculum was everything that our students needed and provided them with direction as they began their careers," says Newman.
Mishra and Newman found that Rider's marketing curriculum was current, but they determined that students would benefit from having more direction in their studies.
“The discipline of marketing had expanded over the years and students needed more structure to recognize this expansion by giving them the opportunity to emphasize a particular area of the discipline of marketing,” Newman says. “Thus, we developed offerings in advertising, digital marketing, professional selling, health care and pharmaceutical marketing as well as a general marketing concentration.”
Giving marketing students a concentrated direction in their studies allows them to have a competitive advantage when they enter the job market. In addition to a concentrated education, Rider’s marketing students are often engaged with consulting projects, case studies and guest speakers, stimulating their interests and broadening their experiences.
Professors encourage students to take full advantage of the opportunities offered both on and off campus. Rider’s convenient location in between New York City and Philadelphia gives students ample opportunities for marketing internships.
“We also encourage our students to become active in the Marketing Student Association, which is a chapter of the American Marketing Association,” Newman says. “We are currently exploring linking our capstone marketing course with becoming certified through the American Marketing Association.”
Another identifiable strong point of Rider’s marketing program is its connections to major employers, as all College of Business Administration (CBA) programs are.
“Through our own Marketing Advisory Council, strategic connections have been made with companies such as Johnson & Johnson, DHL, UPS, Northwestern Mutual, Banker’s Life and Fastenal, to name a few,” Newman says. “We also have linkages in our Advisory Council to several strong regional employers, and the CBA provides strategic linkages through members of the Dean’s Executive Advisory Council.”