Sport Preparation Versus Higher Education

Sport Preparation

A college athlete is hoping to get drafted into the NFL, but knows he needs to take it up a notch to compete with and dominate the competition.

He looks for the best NFL prep coach he can find and afford and hires him to train him rigorously in all the basic, advanced, and physical skills he will need.


The coach does an assessment on the athlete and then designs a program that addresses the athletes particular weaknesses and more fully develops his strengths.

They run basic skills at half speed with plenty of technique work that addresses each component in a safe environment with no risk of injury and plenty of instant feedback. Full speed drills done in a game-like situation are postponed until technique is mastered and repeatable at full speed automatically.

Training is done year round even after the athlete has successfully made it into the NFL. Physical preparation is done in-season and off-season with varying intensities, but no important skill is ever dropped and the athlete never takes off any significant lay offs.

Higher Education

A college student is hoping for a job in his chosen field, but knows he needs to take it up a notch to compete with and dominate the competition.

He looks for the best graduate program he can find and afford and applies hopes for rigorous training in all the basic, advanced, and professional skills he will need.

The school performs no assessment on the student and then launches into a program that is created as a "one-size-fits-all" regardless of student strengths or weaknesses.

Basic skills are bypassed for more advanced ones immediately without segmenting anything and very little feedback in a high pressure environment. Complete acquisition of skills are expected in a sink-or-swim environment that mimics "real" life expectations and little chance to develop individual skills before synthesizing them all together.

Classes are done on a semester or quarter schedule and are finished once their careers begin. Education is done only during the semester classes and the entire winter and summer months are take off for skills to deteriorate. Several skills are completely forgotten and long lay offs are common.

Conclusion
I'm sure I could go on and on about the differences between a good coach for sport preparation and the way education is run for career preparation. However, I hope that this illustrates the basic points that I've been thinking and talking about with a number of professors that last couple weeks. 


The one size fits all and the predesigned programs are not what the future of education is going to look in my opinion. The brakes are constantly being put on motivated students by this approach and leading to frustration and burnout as they are forced to sit through classes and material they find boring, useless, or irrelevant. 

I think as education becomes more accessible and we begin to see graduation rates increase, the value of degrees will go down and the market will turn to a more "coach-like" paradigm. Rather than chasing degrees and classes, people will begin to hire personal educational coaches that can deliver what they actually want or need. This will happen as more and more of the population attains advanced degrees and are not able to separate themselves from the population from the paper they receive. They will be forced to look for improvement in other ways. This is just one way that seems likely to me.