http://www.mainecampus.com/main.cfm?include=detail&storyid=553680
at the university of maine it appears that people that play sports are given precidence to take any class over everyone but seniors.
could the school be sued over this? should it be? (none but two teams bring money to the school)
At my school both athletes and Student Council members had priority in registration.
The logic is that they have greater scheduling concerns, as they have weekly practice and/or meetings that they have to include in their planning.
I don’t necessarily agree with it, but it seems to be a well-established practice. I’m not sure what basis you might have for a lawsuit.
It does make a certain amount of sense in college, since they have practices at the same time as classes are scheduled.
That’s not saying it wouldn’t piss me off if it meant I couldn’t get into a class.
P.S. The link requires registration to view.
well sports are volentary, there are jobs and other hobbys that take time thats class time… they don’t get free rides.
everyone pays the same amount of money, playing sports is entirely volentary. if they can’t scedual classes while doing sports unless they somehow pay more then it shouldn’t be any more conciteration that my… videogame habit or something. the best electives are hands on and have small enrollment limits… meaning atheletes will ALWAYS get to take photography for an art requirement while everyone else needs to take art 101 or something less exciteing.
if jeff was in a wheel chair and was denyed access to a class because mary the soccer player got that, would THAT be illegal? it sort of gurentees certain classes would be forbiden to sections of the handicaped (the ones without option to play sports… people with MS for example)
Sports aren’t voluntary if you have a sports scholarship.
When I was in college, I couldn’t take the requisite spelling class cause the atheletes got first priority.
is this really pretty much standard practice? I’m really surprised… it seems outragous to me… atheletes are hardly the only group of college students to have outside requirements. are they really so entirely special?
Yes, it is SOP. Yes, they’re that special. Student athletes have other obligations to the school that other students with jobs and hobbies don’t have. Of course the school gives them the opportunity to schedule around practices. Even in high school, the athletes got out of class early to take the bus to away games. You want to sue about that too?
owl, while I have problems (largely irrelevant as I’m neither a student nor an alumnus of any university) with the emphasis placed on sports at institutions of higher learning, the fact is that the sports players are the ones who bring A LOT of money to the schools. They are, naturally, going to get as much special treatment as necessary to make sure they keep winning, because that’s what makes the Boosters pull out the checkbooks.
good evening friends,
at the university of nebraska, they have just announced the construction of a new athletic facility to the tune of 40 million dollars.
due to state budget cuts, 350 jobs have been eliminated there in the last two years. the last round of buget cuts eliminated more than 30 tenured professors.
whole acedemic programs have been slashed.
in the midst of this, they hired a new defensive co-ordinator for $250,000.00 a year base salary.
something is seriously wrong with the priorities of this institution.
At my small humble community college, athletes are virtually unknown. Those who get priority registration are the President’s Scholars who get their stuff paid for as long as they keep a 3.5 with 15 units.
I played collegiate tennis…and we got to register for classes before the rest of the student body.
A number of reasons for this:
We were forbidden to take Friday classes…as we typically traveled to other schools for competition Thursday night and played other schools Friday, Saturday and Sunday (maybe).
Our practice started at 2:30pm…no excuses…if you had to get your ankle taped…you had to get to the training room at 2. If your back needed to get worked on and your ankle needed taped…1:30…as we shared our training room and trainers with cross country, softball and basketball.
Night classes were not an option with our coach as we sometime had “optional (read: schedule them or you don’t play) individual workouts” at night with the grad/student assistant coaches (so we could get around the 20 hour rule).
Honestly, the preferential treatment was only benefit my freshman year as after my 1st year I started to get into my major of study and the classes were usually never full.
My big problem came with trying to get my last 2 or 3 classes to complete my degree when they were only offered at the 3-5pm slot or on the Wed-Fri schedule…
I don’t think the preferential treatment was about money…it was more about giving the kids the chance to graduate in 4 years when only about 5 hours of the day were available for classes…especially if you had a Nazi bastard a-hole for a coach like I did.
umaine… sports are big money pits… only two even break even. so the “they work for the school” arguement doesn’t pan out… anyway… I’d like the option to give the guy a 50 and get to register a week early too.
For the most part, wholly incorrect. Only a very small handful of collegiate sports programs actually make a profit or even manage to break even. The vast, vast majority all lose money. The programs that do lose money simply divert additional funds to make up for the deficits from academic programs (similar to the poster who mentioned that Nebraska was building a new athletic facility while 350 jobs were cut).
I strongly urge everyone to read Murray Sperber’s excellent book called “College Sports Inc.”. Sperber, an English professor at Indiana University, has been a longtime vocal critic of collegiate athletics and, in his book, debunks a lot of the myths surrounding sports programs at universities and exposes the widespread fraud and sham surrounding the concept of “student-athletes”.
At my school seniors go first. Then it’s juniors/soph/fresh, and what day you register depends on your last name.
At my old school, student employees who worked for the Registrar’s office got to register first, because they had the sucky job of helping all the other students register.
I think this is a whole bunch of whining over nothing. First think of the percentage of athletes at a school. Then think of the percentage of those athletes that are lower than you on the registration totem pole normally. Those are the only people who are “cutting” you in line. I’m sure if all of them decided to sign up for basket-weaving or whatever, you’d be out of luck. Here at Wisconsin athletes get to register earlier than the people in their own class by a few days, but they aren’t all at the front of the pack. I do agree that there are some very serious things wrong about college sports, especially the black hole of money that most are, but complaining about class registration just seems petty.
The scheduling thing, as I said before, is because of the athletes’ obligations, not because of the money. The school knows that, for example, volleyball players can’t take classes on Friday afternoons, and there are certain classes that they need to take, so they’re allowed to register before those classes fill. The school isn’t in charge of other students’ extracurricular activities, but it is in charge of the athletics. It’s got nothing to do with the money the big programs bring in. The schools are just helping out the kids who they know have other university-related activities besides academics. Honors students get the same early registration deal at Florida State, for what it’s worth.
If you want something to complain about concerning college athletics, like others have said, you can find better stuff than this. You could start with the fact that some of the stars have “aides” that just flat out go to class for them.
Regents’ scholars (a recognition given based on the PSAT in my state) got all kinds of bizarre privledges at my college. They got to sign up first, garenteed on-campus housing (a big deal) and probaby a bunch of stuff I don’t know about.
Used to drive me nuts. Why create different classes of people? Their privledges were only tangentally related to their studies. It’s not like they had special programs to follow- the Regents’ scholar I knew just sat in his dorm room smoking pot all day. The obvious answer is to attract more Regents’ scholars (they get a special recruitment day, even) but I still don’t like the idea of them being “more equal” because they are more important to the University than us plebes. Feels like a kick in the face, you know?
The handicapped also get to sign up first, which makes sense because they might have to deal with assistants, interpreters, inacceassable classrooms and long undoable trips across campus. However, my very mobile handicapped boyfriend who does not have any special needs or considerations still got to sign up before me, which was a source of yearly fights =).
Jimmy Chitwood pretty much hit the nail on the head with his posts. Whilst playing basketball in college, I had workouts in the morning, which tended to knock out 8 AM classes. I had practices in the afternoon or evening, so pretty much any class from 2PM on was out. During the offseason, I still had workouts at approximately the same time. Add on to that about 5 months worth of games, about half of which involved road trips, and finding classes and teachers that both fit within my available time and were understanding of my other obligations as essentially a paid employee of the university would have been pretty much impossible if I had to also deal with classes that filled up and left me no options.
So yeah, I may be biased, but I fully believe that the fact that the athlete’s class schedule has to fit into a pre-determined slot of times makes it necessary to be able to have as many options available as possible.
Was the building built with state funds or athletic booster money? Is the coaches salary paid for with state money or athletic department specific money? Were academic programs slashed due to lack of funding, or lack of participation by the population? A lack of spending in one place is not always related to a wealth of spending in another. I’d be inclined to say that while your examples of cuts are tear-jerking they are probably only tangentially related at best to the spending on the football program.
Please feel free to show how the money going into the football bucket had some effect on the money never reaching the jobs/programs bucket.