<p>It’s easy to take shots at Sports Management majors (as I did above), which frankly sounds preposterous. On the other hand, my wife – a Yale summa double-major in fairly traditional stuff – regularly complains that no one ever told her about Cornell’s School of Hotel Management when she was a kid. She says she would have loved to have gone there, and would probably have had a very satisfying career in that field. (And she’s right about that. It would have suited her talents and her tastes, if not her passion for social justice and Making The World A Better Place.) And I have a young cousin with lifelong learning disabilities who has turned a directional-public Leisure Management degree into a very well-paid career as an event planner. </p>
<p>My issue with “Hotel Management” or “Sports Management” isn’t so much that they are niche majors (or quasi-professional majors) as that they are too broad to give anyone the experience of depth of knowledge. You look at all sorts of different areas of knowledge through one lens, and that one lens gives you a sort of focus, but you are still essentially dabbling in many fields without diving deep in any of them: management (psychology, sociology of organizations), economics, finance, marketing, law, architecture, city planning . . . . (that’s for Hotel Management, not Sports). The fact is, however, that a competent person, with a little experience, should not have a lot of trouble translating Hotel Management into Steel Rolling Plant Management or Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.</p>