Why Isn’t Sales a College Major?

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The question seems almost laughable. Sales doesn’t feel “academic” enough to be a major. Others might say it’s a skill that you either have or you don’t, not something teachable. Both are incorrect. More fundamentally, the fact that sales is not a major speaks to the goals of higher education, and how it might not be keeping up with the times.

Let’s start with the innateness of the skill. Yes, there are natural born salespeople. There are also natural leaders, mathematicians, linguists, musicians, writers, and people in other disciplines. That never stopped us from academic study and teaching in those domains. In fact, researchers will tell you that while some people do have innate skills in those areas, others who may not have been born with it can still learn and even master the field.

In terms of “nobleness” of the field, it certainly doesn’t feel like a classic domain such as math, science, history, and literature. Of course, we teach many more modern disciplines. Nuclear power and computer science are both less than 100 years old. Women’s studies, public health, and econometrics are all fairly new, too. In fact, sale’s sibling, marketing, only dates back as a field of study to the dawn of the twentieth century.

It’s interesting that there is a marketing degree, but no sales degree. While people who go into sales can have any background, they typically have degrees in business, marketing, communications, finance, psychology, and other social sciences or liberal arts. Statista lists about 4.3 million sales people in 2021. Marketing data is a little harder to come by, and of course, “sales” has a broad meaning. Still, it’s a far greater number than the number of archaeologists, art historians, and nuclear engineers combined, and those are all established majors.

It comes down to research. Electrical engineering began as a field of study in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Electrical engineers (and some physicists) created the first computers. As computers grew in number and complexity, the tools (literal and academic) needed to use them spun out into its own discipline of computer science. That field has further bifurcated, at the graduate level and these days sometimes even at the undergraduate level, into other fields and majors such as artificial intelligence and data science.

Sales likely hasn’t become a major for two reasons. First, it was not traditionally seen as something that could be objectively studied. It was often viewed as very context specific interactions between a buyer and seller that couldn’t easily be measured or modeled. There was likely some intellectual snobbery that went along with it, sales isn’t being seen as an intellectually lofty area of study, but rather a more vulgar tool about making money. Second, while nuclear engineering came out of physics, and archeology out of history, sales doesn’t have a clear parent. The skills are a multidisciplinary mix of business, psychology, marketing, communications, negotiations, behavioral economics, and other fields. There’s no existing field of study as the midwife, and the researchers in those areas would likely discourage researchers from focusing too heavily on sales. It’s only in the last few decades that sales itself has gotten any serious research, from people like Arizona State University Prof Robert Cialdini (author of the popular book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion). It should be noted he’s a professor of Psychology and Marketing (not Sales, as there is no Sales Department).

And therein lies the problem with higher education. Millions of people work in sales each year. They would all benefit from more formal sales training. Unfortunately, academia is oriented towards research, and this is not an area the ivory tower has deemed worthy. The big research universities have not chosen to formalize this field, and the lowered ranked colleges typically follow the leader.

There may not be droves of high school students who dream of going into sales, but there are enough. Even if it is not a commonly intended field of work, more than enough people do enter the field such that there should be sufficient demand for that field of study in higher education. Sales is one shining example but there are more.

The university system has a noble history, and I believe is still very much a cornerstone of society. However, to stay relevant in today’s world it cannot simply be driven purely by academic curiosity. Colleges and universities must look to expand into new areas of research and education driven by the needs of the market. This is especially true with the rapid pace of change in the workplace.

At the end of the day colleges sell career opportunities to their students. In exchange for time and money, higher education offers the promise of a better career than not having a college degree (or having an educational experience from one of the other colleges against which they compete for tuition dollars).

As any salesperson will tell you, the product needs to meet the needs of the customers. Research universities (the ivies for example) are in the business of research and education is secondary. At the time of this article there are 187 R1 research universities (source); this is out of the 6,000 total colleges in the US (source). Even if we consider the 4,000 degree granting institutions, less than 5% of colleges are major research institutions. In other words, for the vast majority of schools, their primary job is to educate and prepare their students for their future careers.

US News and World Reports lists 64 colleges offering a sales major (search results). However, upon closer inspection many are business majors with a concentration in sales. Again, despite being a bigger field, colleges turn their noses up at them and stick to subjects with more academic backgrounds.

Higher education needs to evolve with the times. I am all in favor of research and academic pursuits, but colleges are also in the business of career preparation. When they miss important, crucial fields of work, it's both their alumni and society as a whole that pays the price.

Maybe if the schools had better sales training themselves, they’d see how much of their own opportunity they were leaving on the table.

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