The student are indeed compensated with an opportunity to get a great education. The fact that many of them choose to basically light it on fire is besides the point. Unless someone is proposing we put a gun to the kids head forcing them to go to class and study, it’s not really the schools job to make sure they get value out of the scholarship.
Certainly the grade fraud should be punished as a crime but it’s not really pertinent to the discussion of if they are being “paid” or not.
Are you aware that there are many other non-athlete students at universities that are being compensated in the form of reduced tuition, scholarships and free room and board? These students are putting in long hours working for the universities and have little to no power. Most of these students are resident advisors, IT staff, librarians and all kinds of other jobs.
If athletes unionize, should the dorm RAs also unionize? Is there a risk of the university discontinuing that program and replacing them with minimum wage staff? Would that be better or worse? What happens to tuition if that happens? One could argue that those students would be robbed of the chance to develop work skills that you can’t get in the classroom.
I hate to play the slippery slope card, but if this keeps going forward things are going to get very complicated in a lot of unexpected ways.
It’s the other way around. Look, people getting work aren’t the only lucky ones: workers are lucky to find work that suits them, and employers are lucky to find skilled competent workers to perform tasks which require a specific well-developed set of skills and knowledge. In this case, the employers are not only exploiting their employees, they are denying that they are in fact employees. Well, the curtain has been drawn back and the illusion of the student-athlete shown for the smoke-&-mirrors it truly is composed of.
Yes, I am aware of non-athlete students receiving compensation for their work. Are you aware of the decision in Northwestern University v. College Athletes Players Association (CAPA) and how it distinguished the decision in Brown University? I strongly encourage you to read it thoroughly so that we can discuss the issue. It is the decision that is being discussed in this thread.
Are you aware of CUPE Local 3903, which represents contract professors, teaching assistants, and graduate assistants at Toronto’s York University? You might consider reading up on it to settle your mind as to your slippery slope concern should for some reason the decision in Brown University not be followed for typical assistantships that are inextricably intertwined with academics.
I like the idea of extending the scholarship at least to 6 or maybe 7 years. That gives the ex-athlete a year or two to finish up their degree without the distraction of sports.
How many would take advantage of the chance? <shrug> It’s hard to tell. But it costs nothing to extend the offer. If they want to finish their degree than it’s a win win for everybody. A couple years tuition could be absorbed by the money the school makes from athletics.
Lots of companies in the past have had company-owned housing, and sometimes tried to evict striking workers. I’m thinking about coal mining companies in particular. I honestly don’t know how that all worked out, but there must be case law on the matter.
I can go along with those with the addition that any said scholarship can be transferred to any relative.
One former college football player told me they had practice for 3 hours a day plus were expected to do about 2 hours in the gym a day. I cant see how anyone could handle any kind of coursework with those demands. And basketball players play about 3-4 times a week sometimes.
Trying to control the students’ income is what got the schools into this mess in the first place. The days of football programs calling all the shots are over. They don’t get to decide what the pay is going to be. The best they’ll be able to do is negotiate it. Even then they’ll have no say in the private financial dealings the players have.
There are people who want to give these players money, a lot of money in some cases. Colleges don’t have the right to suppress those perfectly legal transactions. They’re gonna lose a lot of control and there’s gonna be a lot of chaos that’s gonna piss a lot of people off. All way overdue, in my book.
Frankly I think the NFL is afraid of having to develop a farm league program like baseball does.
Which surprises me because in many markets, college football is bigger than pro football. In many markets you could even argue the reason there are no pro teams is because of the popularity of the college teams. For example Notre Dame or Nebraska.
I’m really quite amazed at the level of hostility to the players by some people. If they operated under the same rules as all other college students, i might be able to understand the hesitation to offer them something that could be seen as special privileges.
But these kids can’t even get a job at Wal-Mart if they need extra money, because the NCAA’s asinine amateurism rules won’t let them. They have to participate in hours upon hours of training and playing each week just to keep their scholarship. And if they suffer a career-ending injury while representing their school, they face the prospect of not only of long-term physical suffering, but of being told that they’re no longer valuable enough for the university to even continue funding their education.
Or, hell, if they just happen to suck at football, they can lose their athletic scholarship, thereby losing their education - even if they have a 4.0GPA.
The hostility reminds me of “peanut allergy” threads, where adults get mad at little children for having a life-threatening allergy. :rolleyes:
Here’s the entire text of a paper that netted a UNC football player an A-minus for a course:
[QUOTE=an anonymous UNC football player]
On the evening of December Rosa Parks decided that she was going to sit in the white people section on the bus in Montgomery, Alabama. During this time blacks had to give up there seats to whites when more whites got on the bus. Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat. Her and the bus driver began to talk and the conversation went like this. “Let me have those front seats” said the driver. She didn’t get up and told the driver that she was tired of giving her seat to white people. “I’m going to have you arrested,” said the driver. “You may do that,” Rosa Parks responded. Two white policemen came in and Rosa Parks asked them “why do you all push us around?” The police officer replied and said “I don’t know, but the law is the law and you’re under arrest.
[/QUOTE]
I want to re/iterate that this shouldn’t be used to disparage the players. This is proof that the university doesn’t care about the players’ getting actual educations.
As others have said, given the time commitment required to keep these scholarships, there’s no practical way they can actually be genuine students.
Or even being able to handle college-level work in the first place. Or even middle-school level work, in this case.
Which isn’t a knock on the players either; there are lots of people in this world who get to age 18 and aren’t prepared to handle college-level work. Some of them are quite capable of playing football for a living. Their path to a football career shouldn’t have to go through college.
The colleges shouldn’t pretend they are capable of being students, and the NFL shouldn’t be able to discriminate against them.
After all, some schools do graduate a significant percentage of their players, and many of those players do good work in proper subjects, and not in bullshit degrees.
Also, while the sporting schedule is tough, it’s no tougher than what some of my students go through in a typical week. I’ve had students who attend classes full time, hold down full-time jobs, and also cope with being a single parent. College is a really tough time for lots of students, especially given the escalating expenses of education.
The problem is not necessarily that the workload alone makes it impossible for a football player to be a student. The problem is that the workload makes being a student more difficult, and if you foist that level of difficulty on people who aren’t academically prepared for college in the first place, it’s just too much for them. The athletes who would have been smart enough for college even without their athletic ability can probably do it, but too many athletes shouldn’t be anywhere near a university classroom in the first place.
Crap, I can’t find it now but earlier today I came across a national poll showing 75% of people identifying as college football fans were opposed to collegiate athletes unionizing. We do have our delusions.
I don’t understand it either. On one side we have a group representing entrenched power and high incomes and on the other we have the “talent” whose skills mean so much to the entire structure and whose post-career success is generally not much better than the average student but who are put through the grinder with less rights than their peers. Yet only 25% of us are supporting the underdogs.