I would think that “costs a lot to operate” would be a strike against equestrian sports, not for it.
Not where you need to show you’re offering equal access and equal to support to well-funded, expensive men’s programs. On a per-participant basis, the cost is fairly low, because it attracts a LOT of interest from women (if you read the link, the average team has 46 members) but there is usually large capital expenditures … which you can point to when you want to build a new men’s basketball stadium or whatever. We just built a show ring for women’s equestrian! or whatever.
There’s really three levels, though they all slide into each other.
For top tier teams in football, basketball, and hockey the top players are nearly always students in name only. They be intensely recruited regardless of how well they did academically in High School, and in college take special easy-pass classes with enough tutoring to esnure they get by whatever theoretical academic requirements there are.
There’s a second tier of atheletes, who get some consideration, but are real students. There might be some scholarship money and a coach might be able to get a player into the school who would otherwise have barely missed, but the player still needs to be at least close to meeting admissions requirements, pass real college classes when they do attend, etc.
For the third tier, being a good athlete is basically like being a good violinist or something (for non-music majors): it does count for something on admissions, because colleges like well-rounded students and particularly students who can point to concrete achievements, but it doesn’t count as much as academics. So for two high school students with identical academic records but one is nationally-ranked table-tennis player, the table-tennis player will probably get in first. But the student who’s first in their high school class will probably get in before that.
Disposable Hero -
I will add my anecdotes, and you can take them for what they are worth. I played NCAA Div. I Women’s Soccer, on scholarship, at the American University in Washington DC.
My team’s collective GPA when I graduated was over a 3.7 out of 4.0. Our entire athletic department’s GPA was a 3.1, including the basketball team’s. There were certainly a few kids who were getting tutoring, but everyone could have gotten into a state university simply on academic merits. All freshman athletes were required to participate in 10 hours a week of study hall, and our grades were fairly well scrutinized.
We were not a money generating program, obviously, but our men’s basketball team was probably breaking even.
I think there is a HUGE difference academically between male athletes in money generating sports (basketball and football), and all other sports. There is even a greater difference between female student athletes and male athletes generally, IMHO.
Anecdote Warning - in my experience, the personality type of women who will perform for many years between the ages of 6 and 18 on a competitive level, such that they will be competing for athletic scholarships in a given sport … are also the very same type of women who will succeed academically, and tend to perform much higher academically than their peers leading up to college.
Our soccer program was fully funded, meaning, that our coaching staff had 18 full scholarships to distribute among 25 rostered players (but remember that each player plays for four years, presumably). So what ever each player is offered by way of scholarship, is then lost from the pool of money for four years. The notion that a football team, at any school, would have 90 full scholarships seems ridiculous. But I could be very wrong about that.
Contractually, we were required to report any income we made during our four years to our compliance coordinator. This included summer jobs, internships, etc… There was a threshold/ceiling amount that our team could earn each year to stay in compliance with the NCAA rules. It was crazy. I understand why the rule is in place. But it was still a pain in the ass.
I chose American University because of soccer. Period. It was a great school, and my parents were not going to have to pay for it. My hard work paid off.
I studied hard sciences (math and biology), for which American was NOT well known. However, it’s proximity to the NIH let to some super awesome internships for me, as well as my first job out of school. So it all worked out in the end.
But to answer one of the posts above - I chose my college based solely on sports. It was a good choice and I don’t regret it. Playing sports for four years also helped me develop some serious time management skills, and learn some other hard life lessons, that have paid off dividends.
Maybe I’m misremembering, but aren’t you a lawyer now? 
This isn’t even remotely true. You’re taking a few isolated cases and extrapolating them to all the schools. That isn’t the case.
I have season tickets to University of Colorado men’s basketball. They have gone to the NCAA Tournament the last two years and will again this year. Among the eight or so players who played regular minutes were two PAC 12 academic All Americans, one who graduated with a 3.6 GPA in math, and the other with a degree in marketing from the business school. Two others had scholarship offers from Harvard. One graduated a year early with a degree in psychology and is in grad school, and another who’s parents both graduated from the Air Force Academy. He won the academic award for all freshmen athletes in all sports. Colorado also does not have any fluff majors. No sports management or the like. To keep eligible you have to be making progress toward a degree in a regular academic subject.
Many, many schools are like this. Just in the PAC 12 there are schools such as Cal-Berkeley, Stanford, UCLA, USC, Washington and Colorado, all among the 50 best universities in the world according to the ARWU. None of them take students who can’t hack the academics.
It’s a popular belief that all football and basketball players are lazy and stupid, but it just isn’t true in 90% of cases.
That may, perhaps, be relevant to my niece’s case, but not to that of my brother-in-law nor to that of the young woman in my class on a soccer scholarship. In the latter case, I am pretty confident that the university in question was not making (or seriously trying to make) money from any of its sports teams. That is, they may well also have been giving some scholarships to male football or basketball players, but they were not making money off them either.
Yes!! Started doing patent law. I made more money as an intern/clerk in patent law then I did in my first few years as a public defender. 
But it was so BORING and even seemed a little bit slimy and unethical to me. I love being in a courtroom. So I’ve found my niche. And I don’t have to work so hard to understand when I have a DNA case.
Agreed. And I think this is the case for most schools, not generally in the top 50 for football or basketball.
However, take a school like the University of Kentucky. Their men’s basketball team is arguably one of the highest $$$ generating in the country. However, in any given year, if the football team makes it to a bowl, any bowl really, that brings in WAY more revenue for the school. So the incentives become pretty strong, particularly with football, to recruit the best athlete period. Regardless of academic prowess. And quite frankly, their basketball team under new dude seems to have become a season long combine for the NBA draft.
Top 50 is way overstating it. It’s really just a handful of players at a handful of schools who don’t belong in college. Just because a player only plays for one year and goes to the NBA, doesn’t mean he is dumb. He may not have taken the hardest classes, but he also had a several million dollar contract awaiting him at the end of the school year. I heard Anthony Davis interviewed at the All Star Game and he seemed like a smart guy to me. Kevin Love was a one-and-done and he’s pretty sharp. Pau Gasol was in medical school when he got drafted. Magic Johnson is a tremendous entrepreneur - he owns the freaking LA Dodgers. Greg Oden took calculus in high school.
It really isn’t like it was in the 80’s anymore.I have a kid in high school and the athletes, even the ones vying for college scholarships, seem to be some of the smartest. My oldest was on the radar of several colleges for soccer, and they would send her NCAA compliance questionnaires outlining what classes she needed to complete and the minimum grades they would accept. It wasn’t as easy as some think.
There are some bad actors out there and some schools who will do anything to get them in, but they are very few.
I’m not saying that most or all of these kids aren’t smart. If you see my comments above, I was a div. 1 student athlete on a team with a 3.7 GPA.
But I don’t think those bad actors out there are quite as few as you think… rather I think the number of high class athletes who are also terrible students are less than is commonly assumed.
I think the booster programs of most major (again, top 50) football programs could teach lessons in greasing palms.
More to the point, Anthony Davis is a stand up guy, and incredibly smart. I love him. But if he was a functioning moron, I think UK would have found a way to get him on the team.
He didn’t get drafted, there is no such process in Spain and at the time the then-coach of Barça met him and asked him to go for tryouts he didn’t play basket.
He was the third player picked in the 2001 NBA draft. Maybe he went from med school to Barcelona, then to the NBA.
No, he was playing for Barcelona before medical school. And actually entered medical school later than would be normal for a Spaniard due to his playing in Barcelona… here it’s a first degree, not graduate.
Moving to the US got him out of his chance to beat José Antonio Corbalan’s record as “the slowest medical student in Spanish history”. I’m not saying he’s dumb, he most definitely isn’t, but the cultural contexts of being hired from a professional team in the second-biggest league in the world or of being hired from a college team, and of going to medical school in the US vs in Spain, are completely different.
Okay, but he was drafted, and the important thing is he qualified to attend a selective medicine program at the best university in Spain.
This reminds me a story from a friend of mine who was tutoring a college football player in English. Long story short, she asked him if he read the book and his reply was “Book? What book?” That was 30 years ago, and it’s still an inside joke catch phrase between us when something doesn’t make sense. One of us will get a confused look on our face and say “Book? What book?”