Watch the Highlights (8 minutes):
The gap between what marketing graduates learn in school and what employers need them to do on day one has never been wider — or more urgent. At the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin, Dr. Ethan Pew directs a Master of Science in Marketing program ranked #2 in the nation, built entirely around employer feedback. In this Bow Tie Tuesday conversation, CampusIQ CMO Veena Vadgama talks with Dr. Pew about what it means to develop "dual brain marketers," how AI is reshaping curriculum faster than traditional academic cycles can keep up, and why the program's biggest growth constraint isn't demand or funding — it's the physical capacity of the largest classroom on campus.
Key Takeaways
— Dual brain marketers: The MSM program is built on an insight from hiring partners — they don't need another generalist or another analyst. They need marketers who think strategically and work analytically. Two-thirds of the 36-credit program is quantitative, covering Excel, Python, R Studio, SQL, Tableau, and Power BI. The remaining third focuses on marketing strategy.
— Platform-agnostic by design: Students aren't trained on specific tools. They're taught how to ask the right questions, structure data, and turn findings into recommendations using the "what, so what, now what" framework — skills that transfer to any platform their future employer uses.
— AI embedded, not bolted on: Rather than a standalone AI course, McCombs is weaving AI across the curriculum — from decision skills (using AI to interrogate data and model scenarios) to agentic workflows. The goal: teach students to direct AI with clear instructions, not just accept its output.
— 110 companies in three hiring cycles: The program's placement diversity tells a story. Instead of funneling graduates into a handful of large employers, MSM alumni land in specialist roles across a long tail of companies — each needing that rare blend of strategy and analytics.
— Capstone consulting — free for companies: The experiential Capstone course pairs student teams with real companies solving real marketing problems with real data. There's no cost to participate, only a time commitment. Companies get substantive analytical work; students get portfolio-ready experience.
— Space constrains growth: The program would accept more students, but cohort size is capped by the largest classroom on campus. A successful, in-demand program limited by physical space — a challenge that resonates across higher education.
Watch the Full Conversation (16 minutes)
Explore CampusIQ Resources
Hear more from higher education leaders tackling campus challenges — from space planning to student outcomes. Watch every Bow Tie Tuesday episode and explore reports, case studies, and insights here.
Read Full Transcript
Dr. Ethan Pew: Fundamentally, they're not learning a platform. They're learning how to create a picture and a story. What are the rows, what are the columns? What's the question that I want to ask? What's the Y axis, X axis? How am I going to figure out what the insight is? We talk about developing the what, the so what, and the now what of an insight. You need a result, you have to interpret it, and then you need to be able to make a recommendation.
Veena Vadgama: Welcome, Dr. Ethan Pew, the Director of the Master of Science and Marketing Program and a Clinical Assistant Professor at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. Welcome. We're so happy to have you on Bow Tie Tuesday. How are you doing?
Dr. Ethan Pew: I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Veena Vadgama: I'm really excited to talk to you today because you have been at the front end of a new curriculum that the university has offered called the Masters of Science in Marketing Program. Can you explain a little bit about what that program is?
Dr. Ethan Pew: The MS Marketing program is a 10-month Master's program where students learn about marketing strategy, marketing analytics, and how they fit together — developing dual brain marketers that are really able to see both sides.
Veena Vadgama: And what's the need in the market that helped create this concept?
Dr. Ethan Pew: The MS Marketing program is really designed around industry needs. When this program was being put together, the McCombs School went to all the hiring partners and said, what would you be interested in for an MS Marketing program? What emerged was that hiring partners said: if we need someone who's an entry-level hire, we'll go to the BBA program. If we need someone gunning for the C-suite, we'll go to the MBA program. There are other MS programs that blend those two, but it doesn't really fit a need. So the program said, what need do you have? And they said marketing analytics.
That turned into an entirely new iteration on the curriculum. Overall, it's 36 credits. Two-thirds of the courses are quantitative analytics, where students spend a lot of time thinking about Excel, Python, RStudio, SQL — all of the systems they can leverage with hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of records. The other third of the coursework focuses on marketing strategy: how can we ask really good questions with that data? Most programs will give you lots of training in one or the other, but not really a mix of both.
Veena Vadgama: You guys have some pretty impressive stats. Your program has placed students in 110 different companies across the country. Is that right?
Dr. Ethan Pew: Yes.
Veena Vadgama: One of the things I've heard you say is the most important platform to teach students are the ones that the future employer is going to use. How do you prepare students for a landscape where the tools are changing faster than the curriculum can keep up?
Dr. Ethan Pew: The program is platform agnostic with the exception that you have to know Excel. That's the lingua franca of business — there's going to be an Excel CSV file somewhere. Those building blocks set you up to work in lots of different platforms. We make sure students have exposure to RStudio, Python, SQL, Tableau, and we've added Microsoft Power BI for a second bite at data visualization.
But fundamentally, they're not learning a platform. They're learning how to create a picture and a story. What are the rows, what are the columns? What's the question I want to ask? We talk about developing the what, the so what, and the now what of an insight. You need a result, you have to interpret it, and you need to make a recommendation. All of that can happen in any platform. What you really need is to think about the important question — that's where the strategy component is critical — and then turn that into a data or analytics question.
Veena Vadgama: How is the program bringing AI into the curriculum?
Dr. Ethan Pew: The plan so far has been that AI gets embedded across the curriculum. We have one course, AI and Marketing, which covers machine learning topics, data mining, custom-tuning LLMs — getting under the hood, not just prompt engineering.
Thinking back a couple of decades, no one would've said let's have an entire course on how to conduct a Google search. But we've seen shifts even in the past six months where we want to give students skills around getting the most out of AI platforms. The vocabulary around this is still developing. One concept I've been meeting with faculty about is using AI for decision skills: What is my problem? What data do I have? How can I build test cases or see around corners?
There's a whole other skillset around workflows and agentic models — building systems that do more sophisticated things. But even if AI writes the code for you, you need to give it clear instructions. You need to understand what the mechanics are doing and have an intuition for it. Otherwise you're just asking your AI platform to do the work and thinking for you. That's where we need to train students — how to think, so they can get the most out of all the tools they're going to use.
Veena Vadgama: I'm so loving that response. From somebody in the industry who has been working in B2B marketing and hiring a lot of people, there has been so much concern about AI taking away job opportunities. The one thing I say, and you're echoing this: AI in the hands of a smart marketer is so dangerous — in a good way. Versus AI in the hands of somebody with no marketing experience. The quickness with which you can create marketing slop alongside marketing value is instant. But you're helping prepare students to create the value and recognize the slop. That is a skill that is still super necessary.
I want to talk about Capstone because it's a program that folks on LinkedIn should really know more about. It's this really untapped value you're bringing back to the Austin community and elsewhere. Could you describe the program?
Dr. Ethan Pew: I'm so excited to talk about this. Students get an experiential, client-focused course called Capstone. The program works with partners — if you have a marketing problem with data that you want to dive into, please be in touch with me and we'll figure out how to scope the brief. We want students to dive into substantive data analytics problems, something that's been on the back burner that you just haven't had the chance to dedicate resources to. This is where a Capstone team of smart and ambitious MSM students can be really valuable. You hand off the problem to the team and say, here's what we're solving for — go have at it.
Veena Vadgama: Is there a cost to hiring these students for a Capstone project?
Dr. Ethan Pew: There's no cost. The cost is the commitment on your side — the time to have a client point of contact and a data point of contact, which can be the same person.
Veena Vadgama: Going back to the MSM program as a whole, what does the student experience look like? At CampusIQ we really care about student outcomes. Beyond the classroom, how does the environment, the campus, the physical space factor into your curriculum design?
Dr. Ethan Pew: We're thinking about our pipeline and funnel for recruiting high-quality students. The thing we focus on is that we want to fill every cohort with high-quality students, and we would fill up to whatever our room capacity is for the largest room on campus. That's the point where we hit a limit — we can't add another seat because every seat is filled.
The dean's office wants us to have as many students as possible, but there's a very clear focus on quality. The long-term reputation of McCombs and the talent pool we're developing is the first thing we're thinking about. I like to think about students as the product and all of our industry partners as the customers that want to source from the talent pool we're developing.
Because it's a 10-month program, we're able to change the curriculum every single cycle. We don't have long horizons of students that need to graduate — they finish in May and we can make updates. We may add new AI courses or workshops that are flexible in filling spaces to give students more skills.
Veena Vadgama: What drew you to UT Austin to lead the program? What was your vision when you stepped in?
Dr. Ethan Pew: I started at McCombs in the fall of 1999 as a freshman finance major and discovered marketing academia working as a research assistant for a professor. We are preparing students for everything they're going to need for very long and successful careers. In terms of vision, it's continuing all the great work that was put in place before I stepped into the program director role, but also thinking about how we're going to navigate the AI space to carve out the unique value proposition for the MSM program.
Business analytics and other programs are trying to figure out how they'll adapt with AI tools. I think the MS Marketing program actually has a lot of opportunity to lean into analytics and AI because the strategy component becomes more critical to success than just high-octane analytics. It's really fun to work with students, work with industry partners, and get them out into the world doing great things.
Veena Vadgama: Gosh, Ethan, it was wonderful to chat with you today — to learn about these great programs being created across the country, helping students get better prepared for the workforce as it's changing. One of the best lines I've heard in marketing with all the technology changes: it's March today — you don't want to be marketing like it's January because that's how fast it's moving. Thank you, Ethan, for the time today. We appreciate you being part of our Bow Tie Tuesday.
Dr. Ethan Pew: Thanks for having me. This is great.