Ph.D. Program in Marketing
The Marketing Department at New York University's Stern School of Business offers a doctoral program that is widely recognized for the great success of its graduates. It has a large and distinguished faculty working in a diverse set of research areas from both behavioral and quantitative perspectives.
Stern's Marketing Ph.D. program is extremely selective and, once accepted, students benefit from the faculty's dedication to ensuring a positive and productive doctoral experience. The department fosters a nurturing environment with close collaboration between doctoral students and faculty members. By the time students graduate, most have published in leading journals such as the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research or Marketing Science. For example, 25% of our faculty publications in the last three years have been with doctoral students, past and present. Although the primary focus of the program is the development of top researchers, Stern doctoral students also receive extensive training for teaching and begin their first academic appointments well prepared for the classroom.
The fact that we have one of the top-rated Ph.D. programs in the country is also evidenced by our placements of our doctoral students as faculty at top business schools (e.g., Harvard, Berkeley, Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Florida, Michigan). The tenure, publication, and teaching records of our doctoral students are outstanding.
All of these activities give Stern Marketing an important role in mentoring the future leaders of our field.
Program Overview
The Doctoral Program in Marketing selects an average of two students each year from an impressive pool of applicants. The GMAT scores of students admitted in the last ten years average over 700. Despite the relatively small size of our program, our students have won competitive Stern School awards in seven of the last nine years: the Herman E. Kroos Award for the best dissertation, and the Taggert, Nichols, and Nadler Fellowships. They have also received national honors, such as the Richard D. Irwin Doctoral Fellowship and invitations to the Albert Haring Symposium and the Doctoral Internationalization Consortium. Our students complete their studies expeditiously. Those who entered in the last 10 years defended their dissertations an average of 4.5 years later. Most of our students complete their PhD in 5 years.
When they enter the program, students choose faculty advisors who remain in close contact with them throughout their time in the Program. These advisors often change as students' research interests become more clearly defined. The Marketing Department has a Doctoral Committee that meets regularly to evaluate student progress, advise the Coordinator on admissions decisions, consider policy changes, etc. Each year students prepare a Progress Report and Plan which is the basis of an annual evaluation and feedback process involving advisors, faculty for whom students work by doing Research Practica, and the Marketing Doctoral Committee. We have found this process a valuable way to provide our students with guidance when it is most useful.
Our students are actively involved in research from the time they enter the Program and have usually submitted a paper to a refereed publication by the end of their second year. Significant interaction and collaboration with the faculty is a key to this productivity. Through Research Practica, classes, departmental seminars, summer Independent Research Projects, dissertation work, and informal interactions with faculty, research projects are born and transformed into publications. Students are expected to use their initiative and make substantial contributions through both their independent and co-authored work.
Our students are helped to become excellent teachers. They take teaching seminars, sit in on undergraduate and MBA classes, and participate in the departmental Partners in Pedagogy program in which they team up with members of the faculty to work on course materials and audit each other's classes. Our students typically serve as Teaching Assistants and then teach an undergraduate marketing course in their fourth year. Since 1994, a high percentage of Marketing Department Ph.D. students who taught won a Stern Outstanding Teaching Award.
The two factors that are most important to the success of our Doctoral Program are the quality of the students we admit and the commitment of our faculty to their development. We are very proud of our program, the students we produce, and the stature our program has attained in the academic marketing community.
88% of our tenure track faculty members have had close involvement with Ph.D. students in the last five years through one or more of the following: co-authorship of an article, advising, teaching a Ph.D. seminar, or serving on a dissertation or comprehensive exam committee.
In the last five years, collaboration between our doctoral students and faculty while they were in the Program has produced more than 10 articles in refereed publications, including such journals as the Journal of Consumer Research, Management Science, Marketing Science, Journal of Retailing, and Journal of Consumer Psychology.
Despite the relatively small size of our program, currently more than 25 other projects that were initiated by faculty/student co-authors (some of whom have since graduated) are either in progress or in review at leading journals.
Job market success!
Congratulations to Shoshana Segal (Texas A&M) and Ella Xu (Emory) on their appointments as tenure-track assistant professors, beginning in 2025!