Summary: 16 year old in the UK takes the equivalent of a GED, drops out of school and will play for WVU next year.
In my opinion, the NCAA should have the power to stop this stuff. I have commented in the other threads that players should be paid a market wage for their services, but don’t think we want to go down the road of encouraging young people to drop out of high school to play sports.
If he has a GED (well, a GCSE), he didn’t exactly “drop out.” Also, I assume he is considered a “nonqualifier,” which means he pretty much can’t participate in any athletic activities for a year, and this would count as his redshirt year.
He’s presumably going to be going to class, right? And he has his GED-equivalent? I don’t see a problem with this.
The English secondary school system works quite different than the American one. I’m probably missing out on the details, but from what I understand the “last two years of high school” aren’t nearly the same in the two countries, if you count by the typical age people are. There is no equivalent to the high school diploma earned by 17-18 year olds, there is instead a GSCE earned by 15-16 year olds, which the NCAA considers equivalent to a GED*, and thus makes them academically eligible to enroll in college.
Also, if you had read the article, the kid is apparently quite sharp; I’m guessing from his apparent ethnicity you just assumed he was a “drop out” and not an accelerated student.
In other news, he has the same name as the protagonist of Things Fall Apart. Fitting, because in basketball, the Center cannot hold.
*edit: I’m also sure that a wide variety of 15-16 year olds in the US could pass the GED, so I think it’s a reasonable equivalence. Also also, when I was in 8th grade and did well in an academic competition, I heard there were colleges that offered to recruit bright students into college after their sophomore year. That’s actually quite reasonable considering quite a few of the classes I took my last two years were AP classes. I would have been able to take more college-level courses right away instead of needing to grind the credits that most schools want to see in high schoolers but aren’t really college prep things that are absolutely necessary for bright students, like additional literature classes. I recall having to figure out a way to get enough literature courses to meet the vague goal of having 8 semesters of English when I already was an excellent writer and didn’t really care for literature classes, and didn’t pursue it in college. One such way was to take a Linguistics class instead.
I would assume that if you had a 16 year old kid or were advising a 16 year old kid, you would think that it would be better if he completed high school in the traditional way and not take a GED course and drop out, no? If so, why do we want the NCAA to incentivize this for college athletes?
See my previous edit. If I were advising a talented academic student who also happened to be a top sport talent, and that person had the ability and desire to entire college at 16, I would tell them to take it. Don’t waste your time in high school learning things you don’t need to; you need to take different areas of courses in college anyway, so it’s not like you’re completely missing out. You are missing out of the opportunity to accelerate your life nearly two years (maybe only one because of AP classes).
Maybe my shock at this is not shared and is fairly unique to me. Why the need for the sports nexus? Why shouldn’t every bright kid take the GED at 16 and move on to college?
Because top athletes getting recruited gets more (as in, more than none) notice than top students. Just the way our society is built. Nobody cares when 16 year olds go to college. It might make the news when a 14 -year-old does, but that’s far rarer anyway. It’s perfectly normal, as I indicated above, for people to not take their last two years of high school and go straight to college. It’s not particularly popular, in part because you need to be extremely talented, but it happens enough such that it was casually mentioned to students and their parents when placing high at a middle school academic competition.
He’s going to be 17 when he starts college this fall per the linked article. There are tons of 17 year-old college freshman every year at every large university. It’s only mildly newsworthy because he’s an athlete, but otherwise no big deal.
Question: Is high school nice now? Meaning that it no longer requires a super-wealthy family, movie star-level heart-melting charisma, connections that would make Oliver North envious, or five years of Krav Maga training to ensure that it isn’t a constant living hell and the grownups who are supposed to be protecting the most vulnerable kids actually freaking do instead of blowing them off with the most minimal effort required? Not have a faint prayer that it isn’t a constant living hell, ensure that it isn’t a constant living hell. I honestly don’t know (I don’t have young relatives in state or any other reason to follow the high school scene), but from what I’ve read, we still have a ways to go.
Absent any evidence to the contrary, I say that high school is something you get the hell over with as quickly as possible. So if you have have college sport aspirations, go for it. You only live once. If you’re also a great student, that’s even more incentive to go somewhere where anything above predictable mediocrity isn’t completely wasted.