The Advantage of Non-Careerist Disciplines: Jason Fertig Guest Post

Jason Fertig is an assistant professor of management at the University of Southern Indiana.

This business professor is envious of liberal-arts professors. Why is that?  Allow me to provide an analogy.

I’m thinking of the differences between fictitious soccer and football coaches at State U. I see Soccer Coach Locke as akin to many professors in the liberal arts.  His team competes in Division III and he knows that most of his players are not seeking to be soccer pros, even though he would certainly encourage and support those with potential to work towards that goal if they choose. Either way, many of Coach Locke’s players take their student-athlete balance seriously.

Because of the type of players on Coach Locke’s team, he takes pride in getting them to play as well as they can (and win many games), to work hard, to handle the ups and downs maturely, and to learn some discipline that they can carry through their lives.  Coach Locke knows that his main goal is to field a team that plays hard and respects the game.  In turn, his players have become successful lawyers, executives, teachers, and even professional soccer players; some have also led less than moral lives, ending up in jail or with multiple failed marriages.

Regardless, few former players blame these failures on Coach Locke. Not all of the successful ones look back on their college soccer career favorably, but some certainly will take pride in it for their whole lives.

Business professors make me think about Football Coach Pete. His team plays in Division I-A. Because of the revenue generated by his program, Coach Pete’s team is expected to compete and win each year, and many players on his team arrive with the goal of becoming professional football players.

The more players that get drafted from Coach Pete’s team, the more top high-school students want to play for this coach, which leads to a greater possibility of a winning team (and the coach keeping his job). Unfortunately, the odds of many of these players getting drafted are not as high as they think. There are hundreds of players who play the game as well as they do, but Coach Pete’s players just think that because they play in Division I, they deserve to be looked at and drafted by the pros.

Coach Pete has enormous difficulty getting his team to focus on playing football. Many of his players’ enjoy a celebrity status that leads them to be less motivated to work on their games. Many of his players also care more for schmoozing with agents or padding their own individual stats rather than playing the game as part of a team. This causes tremendous stress for Coach Pete because while he has some professional connections, he knows that the best he can offer is what he is trained to do—make his team better players and people. That in turn will maximize their chance of success as professionals.  Ultimately, State U produces its share of football pros, but only 5 to 10 percent of recruited football players are drafted.

Yet, many of Coach Pete’s football players have lead successful lives and careers as well; some have also gotten into trouble, but a larger than desired portion look back on their college football career and realize how much they left on the table by not taking advantage of the opportunity to learn. Some even wish that they had red-shirted their freshman year because they would have been a little more mature during the process.

Over time, Coach Pete has grown jaded in that he wants to teach life lessons and exercise discipline for those who need it, but his unwillingness to give up the salary premium he gets for his position locks him into offering a form of mass career preparation that he knows deep down will only benefit a small portion of his players.

While we can debate the nuances of my analogy, I stress that real education will increasingly fall victim to mass credentialing if professors and administrators primarily seek to emulate and hire “Coach Pete,” while closing the ivory doors to the Coach Lockes of the world.