I have heard that a marketing degree is not needed to go into marketing and the marketing classes taught are very outdated. Would majoring in digital marketing be better or just replacing this major with statistics be better? My goal here is to get a job right without going to grad school.
Can’t answer about which is better but can attest to students getting marketing jobs without going to grad school.
D18 just graduated with marketing major/ advertising minor. She had multiple offers before school ended. A friend’s daughter graduated in Dec. (different school) and had the same experience. Marketing major with multiple offers right out of school.
What seems to be more important for getting jobs right out of school is acquiring internships. Both girls had multiple internships.
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I would view it differently. In my day, marketing was a fluff degree. Today marketing is typically much more quantitative and data driven and these are great skills.
What you’re getting at is there a required education to do the job ? Typically not. This is not accounting or engineering or teaching.
Many folks will work for a big company…do some rotations which might include starting in a call center, serve as analysts in whatever department and roam if you will. Marketing is the type of job they can do with any degree.
But to answer your question - no, you don’t need the degree in the field but that’s the case for most jobs.
Is digital better ? Not necessarily. You can take a class or two…it’s more focused. Some colleges offer certifications…I have some colleagues who did the short program via Ga Tech in digital marketing. But it’s still helpful to understand the basic tenets of marketing…the 4 Ps or 9 if you’re an ASU MBA like me or the 6 Ps if you work for the company I do 
If you are, let’s say a history major, with effort you could still land a marketing internship and job.
Good luck.
What is taught in marketing classes is at least 5 yrs out of date, and more often 20 yrs out of date. My oldest’s latest employer essentially told kid this flat out at the interview for kid’s most recent job. All they cared about was the kid’s apparent drive and past sales record. And still, they wanted to know that kid either had the undergrad degree, or was about to get it, as a minimal hurdle for hiring.
I don’t know if it’s losing value. I just know that having a bachelor’s in marketing, if what you’re going into is marketing or sales, is still valuable, as a minimal baseline qualification.
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I wouldn’t advise my kids to get a marketing degree. IF they were interested in that field, an econ, business, math, or many other degrees would be better long term, IMO. I feel the same about communication degrees, YMMV. I have hired for marketing roles and often hired someone with a good grasp of numbers and the sales cycle. Helps if they are good at writing as well.
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Back in my day,
the best business degrees were accounting and finance.
Information systems was by itself.
Marketing and management were the lower tier.
Maybe it’s changed.
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Nope. Still true. But they are more pre professional. Accounting is gold. To be an accountant that’s your degree.
In marketing you find all sorts of majors…business, social science, humanities. U name it.
Supply chain also a great degree today but another where many people in the field dudnt major in it.
For a kid who knows what marketing is-- and is interested- I’d suggest psych or statistics as the way to go academically. I’m not aware of any undergrad marketing program (and I’ve hired hundreds of marketing people in my career in corporate recruiting) that is as academically rigorous as a degree in statistics or psych- both of which would position a new grad very well for an entry level marketing role.
You can look at the course catalog of any big U which offers a marketing degree and look at the required courses to see that the analytics are watered down vs. a more rigorous program. Why take “Buyer Behavior” (which is the easy version of a statistics course where you learn what a regression is) when you can take actual statistics and learn to DO regressions and interpret them? Why take “Introduction to Market Research” when you can take an actual psych sequence and learn how to structure a study which eliminates bias, or how to choose a representative sample for whatever it is you are studying, etc?
I don’t think marketing degrees are losing value… they’ve always been “business lite”.
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Agree that marketing has always been considered an “easier” business majors. IMO in today’s world a marketing degree degree would be more valuable if paired with statistics, data science etc.
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