The public relations degree program at Seaver College teaches students to write, plan, and build relationships between organizations and the public. Public relations continues to grow as a field and offers numerous job opportunities, from event planning to speech writing. Whether you are interested in advising a CEO on how to best communicate with various publics or you want to promote your favorite writer, the public relations major will prepare you to do your job well.
Our public relations majors pursue jobs in non-profit organizations, governmental agencies, and businesses. Pepperdine has one of the oldest public relations degree programs west of the Mississippi.
In the late 1970s, Professor Emeritus Dr. Fred L. Casmir started one of the first public relations programs in the West Coast at Pepperdine University. Although its initial incarnation was as a sub-unit of the journalism major, student interest increased so much and so fast that the sub-unit became a sequence within the Bachelor of Arts in Communication. In an era when professional internships were not widely accepted, Pepperdine became one of the first universities in the country to develop a professional internship program for public relations students.
The Pepperdine public relations program outgrew its journalism roots and became an independent major in 1986, with a balance of theory and practice throughout its progressive curriculum. Since becoming a full major, the public relations curriculum has been deliberately modeled after recommendations made by the 1987 Commission on Public Relations Education Report, the 1999 Public Relations Education for the 21st Century: A Port of Entry, and the 2006 Report of the Commission on Public Relations Education, The Professional Bond. The reports are products of an appointed committee of leading international educators (including Pepperdine public relations program director Dr. Denise Ferguson) and practitioners representing a consortium of allied academic and professional communication organizations: the Public Relations Society of America and its Educators Academy; Institute for Public Relations, National Communication (which Dr. Ferguson represents); Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication; Global Alliance for PR; Canadian Public Relations Society; Council of Public Relations Firms, Center for Global Public Relations, Hispanic Public Relations Association; Association for Women in Communication, Black Public Relations Society, International Association of Business Communications, and International Communication Association.
Quality Assurance: Each degree program should employ sufficient faculty such that there is a capacity to design and deliver the curriculum (CFR 2.5). Curriculum design and implementation should involve evaluation, improvement, and promotion of student learning and success (CFR 2.5). Thus, faculty are responsible to exercise effective academic leadership on a consistent basis to ensure that the program's quality and educational purposes are upheld (CFR 2.6). Student support and co-curricular programs and services of sufficient nature, scope, and capacity go hand-in-hand with the degree programs for promoting students' academic, personal, and professional development (CFR 2.13). - WSCUC 2023 Handbook, Standard 2