Michael Horn and Jeff argue that a college major matters only if it combines three things: classroom theory, hands-on practice, and performance. They used their journalism backgrounds as examples, describing how student newspapers forced them to meet deadlines and produce finished stories, turning theory into real work.
So, Jeff, I was a history major, but I really majored in the Yale Daily News. I don't think anyone cares what my major actually was. But I know that that is not the universal truth across higher ed. Your major in certain quarters really does matter, or at least that's what I hear. What's the surprising truth that we ought to know about college majors?
Yeah. You know, Michael, I was a journalism major mainly because whenever I would get one of those view books in the mail, I wanted to be a journalist. I thought you needed to major in journalism to be a journalist. And what I felt is like, we probably the two of us should combine because that's really what journalists need today. And by the way, every major needs, right. A mix of that theory, practice, and a little bit of the performance piece of it. And I picked those three terms because we talk about that at my undergraduate alma mater all the time, where, as you know, I serve on the board. We started as a music conservatory. And that really is kind of how musicians are taught often. Right. There's a lot of there's some classroom time, there's some practice time, and then there's actually performance time. And I always think about that, well, why can't we apply that metric, that rubric to every major that there's some time spent in the classroom. Right. To think about that theory that there's some practice time. Because one of the things I don't think that we get enough reps on is practicing and then really putting people the hands on learning we talk often about is really putting people into real life situations so they could kind of sweat the details. And as you talked about, you know, the Yale Daily News, I'm sure that sitting in the Yale Daily News and all I could think about is the Gilmore Girls every time you see the Yale. Right. But like, as you know and I same with the working on student newspaper at Ithaca. Right. Like working on deadline teaches you a lot. And having to go, as you, I know you had to in your case, right. Go to interview Rick Levin, you know, go to cover a game and then have to write a game story on deadline. Like, boy, do you sweat the bullets. Like, those are the things that we should be helping students understand in a much greater way.
