Marketing program ranks among the best

By Lauren Lavelle

Rider’s College of Business Administration has recently been named one of the top five best colleges for marketing majors in New Jersey, according to a career search website.

Zippia, using data from the National Center for Education Statistics and College Scorecard, honored Rider after a recent revision was made to the marketing curriculum. This improvement was led by assistant professor Anubha Mishra and professor Larry Newman in the department of Marketing, Advertising and Legal Studies.

“I definitely think we deserve this,” said Mishra. “As a department, we have worked very hard to develop a curriculum that reflects the content of the change in market.”

By taking note of the ever-changing marketplace and focusing on the wants and needs of students, Mishra and Newman worked together to develop a marketing curriculum that gave the option of studying a specific aspect within the marketing world. This includes topics such as digital marketing, advertising, sales healthcare, pharmaceuticals and general marketing.

“Marketing in general is changing a lot with the use of the internet, and all user-generated content is important so social media plays a very important role in marketing these days,” said Mishra. “[These programs] are specifically geared to give students the skills that are required by these areas and the marketplace.”

Newman claims their main goal throughout the approval process was to give students what they needed in terms of marketing evolvement while simultaneously keeping the new curriculum as structured as possible.

“While we found that we had remained current with respect to our offering, it was determined that students could be better served to have more direction in their studies,” he said. “The discipline of marketing has expanded and evolved over the years and students need more structure to recognize this expansion by giving them the opportunity to emphasize a particular area of the discipline of marketing. We have added courses and changed the curriculum as needed but we had not changed the structure of the major and specific directions for our students.”

As of right now, mostly freshmen are taking part in the new curriculum, but Mishra hopes upperclassmen will find interest in the specific concentrations as well.

“This batch of freshmen in fall 2017 are the first class that will take these concentrations, but we have also opened it to other students in the program,” she said. “The enthusiasm and acceptance of students of these concentrations have been great so far.”

Newman and Mishra both agree that increasing the specificity of Rider’s marketing program will greatly benefit students as they enter the workplace.

“We want to give our students what they need to have a competitive advantage in the marketplace,” said Newman. “With the added structure and continued flexibility, our students will be well positioned for successful careers.”

Mishra added, “I believe that the flexibility we are going to give to our students in terms of the choice of classes and their emphasis on what part of marketing they like is going to help us place them in better companies, with better job prospects.”