What do marketing PhD admissions committees want to see on your college transcript? Like the GMAT score (though less so), committees are looking for any kind of semi-objective way to compare the abilities and aptitudes of a large stack of reasonably qualified applicants.
GPA
There is no official PhD-required GPA, but more competitive schools have applicants with higher GPAs, as you’d expect. Grad school GPAs have known to be inflated, so admissions committes often look to undergrad GPAs as a better metric for comparison. This isn’t to say that a low undergrad GPA is a deal breaker, since some schools suffer from serious grade inflation and others are the opposite, but admissions committees want evidence that you won’t fail your PhD coursework.
Many schools publish the average GPAs of the incoming class and sometimes of incoming applicants. Most of the time, GPAs range between 3.5 and 3.8 (with graduate school GPAs being a bit higher).
You’ll be sending in your complete school transcript to each school you apply to. Some schools may want added detail about your major GPA or the GPA of your last 60 credit hours.
The takeaway is that grades matter. They aren’t a guarantee of admission, but are critical to having a competitive profile.
Coursework
An applicant’s coursework history (and corresponding grades) reveal a few things to the PhD admissions committee.
Some schools that place a heavy emphasis on quantitative/modeling research (many of the top-ranked ones) give heavy preference to applicants with a specific quantitative foundation. This may include advanced calculus, advanced statistics, linear algebra, or econometrics.
As admissions to PhD programs gets more competitive, top applicants are often those who have been planning for academic careers in advance and have proactively molded their college curriculum to be more quantitative. If you have any extra time in your schedule, it’s in your best interest to take some advanced math or statistics classes. Good grades in advanced classes that you didn’t have to take sends a positive signal to PhD committees.
Consider the three most common undergraduate majors that end up in a marketing PhD program: marketing, psychology, and economics. Funny enough, the basic course requirements to graduate in each major end up putting psychology and economics ahead of marketing in terms of training. One professor I talked to was straightforward about the fact that marketing majors today are disadvantaged in the admissions process if they haven’t planned ahead.
If you’ve already graduated, you may consider auditing some courses, but for many working professionals, this is just impractical. Today, there are many online structured or self-driven courses to teach these things. Check out places like MIT OpenCourseware, Coursera, and EdX. Admissions committees may or may not be favorable to this approach, but it definitely shows a higher level of commitment and you’ll be able to include it on your resume and in your statement of purpose (and if you’ve approached these courses seriously, you can really make your transition into a marketing PhD program that much easier.)
*If there’s a profile element I could go back and improve, it would be coursework. Basic statistics and calculus is good enough for the career field, but grossly inadequate for a PhD program. Considering my GMAT math score was only around the 80th percentile, having some quantitative bulk on my transcript would have helped me get a closer look from 1-2 more programs (not to mention would’ve saved me the pain of having to learn a lot of those things now, during the PhD program).