Best-value Colleges for Marketing Careers

Marketing and sales are good career paths if you love people or want a job that lets you use your creativity but still earn a high income. These jobs are in high demand — every employer needs employees to convince their customers to purchase their product or service — and you need good communication, writing, and analytical and interpersonal skills to succeed. If you are interested in studying English or communications in college but don’t know what to do with those degrees, consider marketing and sales as a career path.

In Payscale’s College ROI Report, marketing careers and sales careers perform very well. Rhode Island’s Ivy League Brown University often delivers a high 20-year net ROI for alumni who go into sales and marketing jobs. Brown alums include seven Nobel Prize winners and eight billionaires, and the school is one of the most selective in the country; the acceptance rate is only 9.5%. On top of that, the University’s neighborhood is a federally listed architectural district with a dense concentration of Colonial era buildings.

Business moguls of all types have studied at the University of Pennsylvania, another high-ranked school on our list for marketing, PR and sales careers. Also an Ivy League school — and founded by Benjamin Franklin — UPenn has produced more than its share of famous businessmen, and more billionaires went to UPenn for their undergraduate degrees than any other college in the world.

Stanford University in Palo Alto, California reports a consistently high 20-year net ROI for alumni who go into sales and marketing jobs, as does the University of California, Berkeley. Cal is home to the famous Haas School of Business, the a real deal for California residents who want to work in sales or marketing. Like Stanford, these students probably benefit from proximity to one of the hottest job markets in the country, the Silicon Valley and San Francisco areas. Even the coolest tech start-ups need marketing and salespeople to push their products.