Revisiting the Relationship Between Marketing Education and Marketing Career Success

In a replication of a classic article by Hunt, Chonko, and Wood, regression analysis was conducted using data from a sample of 864 marketing professionals. In contrast to Hunt, Chonko, and Wood, an undergraduate degree in marketing was positively related to income in marketing jobs, but surprisingly, respondents with some nonmarketing majors earned about the same as marketing majors in marketing jobs. Satisfaction with a marketing career was not significantly related to academic major. The income regression model explained 30% of the variance in marketing income, which is an improvement over the earlier study, but also indicates that most of the variance in marketing success is not explained by education. Implications are discussed.