 Is a marketing major or a marketing degree worth it? That's what we're gonna be talking about today, but before we jump into that, make sure to gently tap the like button in order to defeat the evil YouTube algorithm. On this channel, we talk about personal finance, college degrees, careers, and opportunities that are gonna lead you to success, and we also talk about avoiding some of the common traps that so many people end up falling for. Now if you're new here and you haven't done it already and that sounds like something that interests you, go ahead and hit the subscribe button and ring the notification bell so that you never miss out. Now with that out of the way, let's jump right in. What is a marketing degree? So with a marketing degree, you're gonna be studying all kinds of different business strategies and marketing theories with the end goal of putting your company's product in the hands of a consumer. Now marketing is somewhat similar to sales, but generally speaking, it's gonna be a little bit less face-to-face. A lot of the time, you're gonna be crunching numbers and doing things behind the scenes so that you can sell your product basically on a massive scale. Whereas with sales, a lot of the time it's just gonna be one-on-one and so you're very limited to how many people you can talk to. Now according to NCES, the number of people who graduate with a marketing degree is about 35,000 a year. Now this one is pretty promising to be honest with you. There are a lot of career opportunities that are gonna be waiting for you. This is because just about every company out there needs people who have marketing skills. Now there are a ton of different careers that you could go for all the way from advertising sales agents, public relations specialists, to becoming a marketing manager. With a good marketing degree background, when you learn these skills, you'll be able to communicate your brand in a compelling way to customers, which will make it much more likely for them to buy your product. Now this is a personal finance channel, so I am gonna be focusing on the personal finance aspects of getting a marketing degree. However, we are gonna be going over four very important categories and I'm gonna be ranking all of these categories on a scale from one to 10. These categories are gonna be salary, satisfaction, demand, and X factors. Then at the very end, I'm gonna give it a final score. Now when you graduate with a marketing degree, you can expect to make around $49,000 a year in your first five years after graduating and $91,400 a year in mid-career pay, which is also 10 years after graduating and after. One career path that you could go down with just a bachelor's level degree is becoming a marketing manager. And according to BLS, they make around $135,000 a year. Now one knock that I have on this major is a lot of colleges out there are still teaching traditional marketing strategies which pretty much don't work anymore. A lot of brands are moving towards digital marketing and social media marketing in order to promote their products and colleges aren't keeping up just because of the fact that the field is moving and progressing so fast. So depending on what school you go to, some of them are gonna be better than others, but you wanna make sure that you buffer yourself and learn skills that are high in demand. So some of these skills might include digital marketing, data analysis, which is gonna involve a lot of use of statistics as well as using spreadsheets, market research, SEO, which is search engine optimization, CRM, which is customer relationship management, and it's never hurts to learn a little bit of software development as well. With a marketing degree, you can move into all kinds of different positions and you can move up the hierarchy of a company which is of course gonna mean higher paying jobs. At the same time, you could also start your own business after getting years of experience which could also mean that you would make a really good amount of money. In my video I did on careers that create the most millionaires, business degrees were all over the list and that is because business degrees tend to go into careers where they end up starting their own business. And they probably also have a much better chance of the business being successful just because of the fact that they learned a lot of the skills that you need in order to be a business owner. With that being said, marketing was not on that list. It wasn't one of the business degrees that were in the top 10. And then on top of that, a lot of the jobs when it comes to marketing aren't all that high paying just because of the fact that it is one of the more popular business majors, but overall the salary is still pretty good. I'm gonna give this one an eight out of 10. Next on the list, we are going to be talking about the satisfaction and this is very subjective. For some people, they might be extremely happy with a marketing degree going into a marketing career and then some people they might absolutely hate it. This is always one of the hardest sections for me to do just because it's so subjective, but overall generally speaking, when it comes to business degrees, most people tend to be very happy and they don't regret it. So according to Zip Recruiter, for instance, business degrees in general were the second least regretted degrees behind of course, computer science. Only 15% of the people who got a business major said that they regretted getting the degree and the main reason was because it's just a little bit too general. So being flexible and being general, it's almost like two sides to the same coin. A marketing degree is extremely flexible. You can work in almost any industry and any business out there and there's a ton of different positions that you can go for. But at the same time, the skill set that you learn can be somewhat general and the whole purpose of going to college is becoming an expert in a specialized skill. If you wanna become a jack of all trades, there's tons of free information out there on the internet and you don't need to go to college in order to learn that stuff. Now, when it comes to meaning and this is a survey that PayScale did where they basically asked people how much they think their job positively impacted the world, business degrees don't tend to do very well and marketing is no exception. It came in at a 39% meaning score which is pretty low. That's not great. However, meaning and satisfaction are not the same thing. You can have a job that you really enjoy like let's say you were playing video games all day long. You really enjoy doing that but it doesn't necessarily positively impact the world. And a lot of the time when it comes to business degrees and business related careers, it's not so much the job that you go for. It has a lot more to do with the industry that you're in or even the business that you work for. And even if you do end up working in a career that you don't really like, there's a lot of different career paths that you can go down so you can always switch. Now, I always say this but generally speaking it's gonna be a good idea for you to work in an industry that's booming, an industry that's doing really well. So we're talking technology industry, finance industry, something along those lines. And it also helps if you work for a business that's doing well. Most of the time you're gonna have a lot more opportunities, you're gonna get rewarded for your hard work and all of that is going to contribute to you being happier. With that being said, flexibility plays a huge role here and if you do find yourself in a position where you're not very happy with it, you can get a few years of experience, get your two years in and then you can move into another position that will probably be a lot better. Overall, I'm gonna go ahead and say that the satisfaction with this one is 7.5 out of 10. Next, we're going to talk about demand and I think out of the four, this one is probably the most important one. The reason for that is because pretty much everything else stems from demand. If you learn skills that are in really high demand, companies are gonna wanna pay you more, they're also gonna wanna treat you a lot better which is gonna make your job satisfaction go up. Now, according to BLS, financial occupations in general are growing at about 5% which is faster than average compared to all other types of careers. For the career that I mentioned earlier which is marketing manager, there's 314,000 jobs available right now. It's growing at 6% which is faster than average and that means over the next 10 years there's gonna be 18,000 jobs that open up. Now, as I mentioned before, there's about 35,000 marketing graduates that are graduating from college with a bachelor's degree every single year and when we look up the keyword marketing degree on monster.com you'll see that 264,000 job postings have a marketing degree in it. That's usually a very good sign that the market is not saturated if so many of the job postings have that keyword in it. As a comparison, when you type in anthropology degree, only 820 job postings pop up and when you type in computer science degree, 141,000 pop up. So 264,000 is very, very good and that tells me that this degree is still in high demand. Now, on top of the high demand it's also extremely flexible. There's a ton of different career paths that you can go down. There's also a ton of different ways that you can do those careers. So for instance, you could go down a career path where you're doing something remotely. You can do digital marketing or if you wanted to, you could move up the hierarchy in a company to higher paying positions. You could become an executive or you could go off on your own and start your own business and become an entrepreneur. This is a very flexible degree and for that reason I'm gonna go ahead and give this one a nine out of 10 for demand. Next, we are going to be talking about X factors and this includes a bunch of other things that don't fall into one of the three categories that we just talked about. Now, business degrees in general tend to do very well when it comes to X factors. For one, they combine really well with other types of degrees. So you can very easily double major in marketing and then a different degree and a lot of the time that's gonna make a great combination. They're gonna end up working synergistically and it'll be better off than if you just got one degree on its own. Another factor to think about is the fact that marketing is gonna teach you skills that are very valuable pretty much no matter what career, what industry or what business you're working for. So for instance, Zip Recruiter has a skill index and when you type in the word marketing there are a ton of marketing related skills that rank relatively well. And Zip Recruiter basically does these rankings by looking at how many jobs are available now, how many jobs are gonna be available in the future so the annual growth, the geographic breadth so how many jobs are available all over the country and then of course the salary. Now another thing that I like to mention when it comes to business related careers is people tend to be a little bit more financially responsible. Now I'm not sure if this is because they tend to learn things in different courses that they take during college that teach them how to be financially responsible or whether it's because people who go into business tend to be more financially responsible. It's kind of a whole chicken or the egg thing which one came first, nobody really knows. But when I did my research on the majors that create the most millionaires you can see that the degrees that were all over the list were business related degrees. I believe that it was six out of the top 10 degrees that were business or business related. And I do think this is partially related to the fact that people end up starting their own businesses and a lot of the time they'll end up getting rich from that but I also think it has a lot to do with the fact that they start saving and investing at an early age and the reason they start saving and investing is probably because they have an interest in business and you pretty much have to learn about saving, investing, budgeting, being financially responsible if you are going to be learning about business. So it could be correlation or causation, nobody really knows and I know that that's totally possible that it's just correlation but you absolutely do see business related majors tending to make a lot of money throughout their lifetime. Now another thing to keep in mind is marketing is not one of the harder majors. You don't see a really high dropout rate like you would in engineering or some of the math related majors. In some ways this is a good thing and in some ways this is a bad thing. It's bad because of the fact that it means a lot of people can do it and so there's not very much of a barrier to entry. Pretty much anybody can do a marketing degree but it's a good thing just because of the fact that your average person can do a marketing degree, you don't have to be a genius. In the study that I looked at out of the most common majors, marketing came in as the 54th most difficult one and that was 54 out of 55 so not very hard at all. So if you're somebody who wants to really enjoy your college experience, you don't want to be stressed out all the time or if you're somebody who absolutely hates math, you don't want to do a really difficult degree, this might be something for you to look into. On the other hand you probably want to supplement whatever you're learning in school with some real life skills. Now of course this depends on what program you're going to, there's gonna be some programs that are gonna teach you better than others but you're probably gonna wanna learn something and specialize in something. It's never a bad idea to learn some computer programming, some statistics. You definitely wanna know your way around a spreadsheet and it wouldn't hurt if you practice a little digital marketing on the side and even better if you get an internship or a job while you're still in college. So overall I'm gonna give this one an eight for an X factor score. So some of the pros here just to kinda go over it really quickly is marketing degrees are gonna be very flexible. There's also gonna be a lot of jobs available out there for you. A business degree isn't all that hard. I know I'm probably gonna get a lot of hate from people when I say that but it's definitely not as hard as an engineering degree or some kind of math related degree. Some of the cons here are that you might learn skills that are a little bit outdated. Sometimes they teach you stuff that's a little bit too general. This is very common when you look at business degrees. A lot of the time they're gonna teach you kind of general skills. So you probably want to supplement that with either an internship or specialize in some other way. Overall if you're somebody who's very interested in marketing, you've done your research and you know that you wanna become a marketer or go into a career path that involves getting a marketing degree, then this can be an amazing option for you. As always you definitely want to do your research, have a really good plan going in. Don't just do marketing just because it sounds fun or anything like that. You wanna make sure that you do your research and have a good plan. You know exactly what you wanna do. You know what your goal is and the exact steps that you need to take in order to get there. I talk about this a lot in my other videos so check those videos out if you don't know what I'm talking about. The overall score here is going to be 8.125 out of 10. That is quite high, that's pretty good. If you haven't done it already, go ahead and gently tap the like button in order to defeat the evil YouTube algorithm. Smash the subscribe button and ring that notification bell and then comment down below with any thoughts, comments, criticisms, et cetera that you have on the video and whatever you do, don't leave. Check out my other videos right here. I made them just for you.