With what other options? They agree because that is all they can do. Less than half the NCAA athletes graduate in 6 years. The rest are there to play sports. Many leave with nothing, not good enough to get drafted and not smart enough to graduate with a useful degree. Still other leave with injuries and get nothing at all for their pains,
I know it’s not GD, but cite? NCAA is reporting 69% across all sports and 66% in basketball which probably has the highest percentage of early leaves.
Gonzo is making shit up, as usual.
The national all-student 6 year rate is 56%. NCAA division 1 Athletes had a 79% GSR in the last cohort (http://www.ncaa.org/wps/wcm/connect/public/ncaa/issues/academics; GSR is different from IPEDS graduation rate) Scholarship athletes in non-revenue sports typically have very high rates, football and basketball are closer to the national average (http://www.ncaa.org/wps/wcm/connect/public/NCAA/Resources/Latest+News/2010+news+stories/October/Grad+rates+hit+high+marks)
I’m not really sure how i feel about the whole NCAA thing, but i find your argument here singularly uncompelling.
Undergraduate scholarships are, in many ways, different in nature from the sort of scholarship-and-stipend packages associated with PhD degrees. Suggesting that the same rules should apply to one as to the other fails to recognize that the two types of scholarship operate under quite different conditions, and come with different expectations.
Also, i’ve had a PhD scholarship with stipend, and the only restriction on my earning was that i was not allowed to take outside fellowships or scholarships without informing my department. If a student in my program won an outside fellowship, our department would generally reduce the stipend that year by the amount of the outside funding. Often, the withdrawn money could be used by the student in subsequent years or their degree.
We were also discouraged from spending too much time on outside employment, but the motivation behind this was not specifically to prevent us from benefiting financially from our own labor or our own abilities. It was to ensure that we had sufficient time and effort to expend on the job for which we were being paid our scholarship and stipend—the job of research and writing and teaching.
That is, the restrictions were there specifically to ensure that we had the time to give the university what it was expecting in the way of scholarly performance. Had some crazy booster come up to me during my second year of grad school and said, “I want to give you $20,000 to recognize the great historical work you’re doing, and you don’t have to do anything for the money,” my department and my university wouldn’t have batted an eyelid.
As i said, i’m not sure how i feel about NCAA rules. I can see the arguments on both sides. But your comparison here is weak and silly and basically irrelevant.
Bingo.
Not gonna make it as a Pro? Good thing you got that free diploma hangin’ on the wall. Awww, didn’t get one? Thats your bad. Try selling your likeness now and see what it is worth. You had 4 years to either work on you skills or do your homework.
I don’t have a whole lot of sympathy for a handfull of future millionaires funding programs for thousands of future “worker bees”. (best I could come up with)
And I’m damn glad the “sweater vest” will be out! (And that maybe 'SC will get a little break from the heat 
)
The problem here is that many people who wouldn’t make it as a professional athlete also wouldn’t make it through a bachelor’s program no matter how much effort they put into it.
Perhaps more importantly, there is no correlation between athletic prowess and academic prowess. There are lots of smart guys among those physically capable of playing (say) guard in the NFL. There are a lot more dumb guys capable of doing so, and some of those dumb guys aren’t smart enough to make it through college.
The point is that tying professional sports to education is absolutely moronic after a certain point. It makes sense to mandate that athletes be, say, high school graduates; after all, some of them are going to be dealing in enormous sums of money.
It makes no sense at all to say they have to go to college, and that’s essentially what the NFL requires.
This is true, and IMO, makes my argument more compelling. As a PhD candidate, I am receiving very advanced training for my career, so they give me tuition, plus a very small wage (for teaching, specifically). As an undergraduate, I was on full scholarship, but it stopped at tuition and books. This is pretty typical for undergraduate scholarships, and is the deal student athletes receive. They get to go to college for free, get a place to live, and get to play the sport they like to play in the biggest and most desirable venues in the country. That’s quite enough. They’re college students. They don’t need to be paid as well.
Well, yeah, because an 18 year old athlete coming out of high school ball may actually be killed in an NFL game. They are in no way adequately prepared for the kind of things that will be expected of them in the NFL. Hell, most draftees from COLLEGE are not really ready, but they’re a hell of a lot closer than some green kid fresh out of high school.
And it’s not just that the NFL requires a college degree. The world does. The fact is that that little piece of paper that shows that you completed at least enough underwater basket weaving to obtain your degree immediately increases your earning potential throughout the working world. Like it or not, it’s pretty much a requirement. And I’m glad that these kids have to do it.
Yeah, your school isn’t making a ton of money off of your graduate assistant labor. For better or worse, Mark Ingram and Julio Jones were worth a lot more to the school than you.
That doesn’t mean it makes sense. But sure, by all means, lets subject everyone to the approval of a gatekeeper who collects the bulk of the benefits before anyone is permitted to make a living. I’m sure we can trust them to always be fair and ethical.
Baloney. Fewer than 40% of American adults, 25 and over, have as much as an associates degree. It does increase your earning potential and it correlates well with total income throughout your life, but it’s by no means a requirement.
I agree that they don’t need to be paid as well by the college. I’m not arguing that the college necessarily has an obligation to provide financing above and beyond the scholarship.
What makes it fundamentally different from any other scenario is that the college (or, perhaps more accurately, the NCAA), not only says that they don’t need to be paid, but actually forbids them from accepting any money from sources outside the university. Did your undergraduate scholarship for tuition and books forbid you from getting financing from any other source? Do undergrad scholarships based on academic merit forbid recipients from getting money from other sources?
Where i went to grad school, the main requirement attached to undergrad scholarships was that the student maintain a particular standard standard of performance in his or her studies (B average, or sometimes higher for more prestigious scholarships). There was no rule saying “Student can’t get money elsewhere.”
http://stanford.scout.com/2/952555.html here are the rates. they are all over the place. make of it what you will, and you will. I did read one that claimed it has gone up to 73 percent,. i suppose you will make one up and pretend it is golden.
The 50 percent came from an ESPN show today.
And 13% to 17% of all adults live below the poverty line. How much overlap do you think there is? Probably quite a bit. It’s not a requirement, I guess. You can go out and shoot squirrels for food, but it’s a pretty goddamn good idea.
This thread had no relevance for me until I saw this episode of South Park.
Probably NSFW
“Crack Baby Athletic Association”. Cartman’s little undercover work more or less nails the whole NCAA zeitgeist.
Minimum Major League Baseball Salary 2011: $400,000
Minimum NFL Salary 2011: $325,000
Minimum minor league baseball salary: As I posted in #40, first year single A ball player makes $1,050 a month for five month a year, and has to pay for insurance, taxes and club fees.
Football “minor league” NCAA: Room, Board, Tuition, Education worth $30,000+
What makes the difference? The NCAA, they fill the 100,000 seat stadiums, there alums pay for the facilities. They make a product people want.
Because a job may turn out to be just a “job”, where athletes are getting paid without showing up or making $1000 an hour for flipping burgers.
The student athletes are supposed to be amateurs. History has shown us that they can be bought and that there are people willing to buy them, so the only way to prevent that type of corruption (in the NCAA’s view) is to forbid them a way to earn large sums of money. It makes the accountability easier when some kid shows up in a brand-new Corvette and claims Grandmama bought it for him on her Social Security payments living in a house worth less than the car.
For all those posters who missed the link about money student-athletes get above and beyond tuition, room and board and fees, and are still going on about how horribly they are taken advantage of, here it is.
*"The typical non-freshman Arkansas football player received the cash listed below in 2010-11:
$5,500- Pell Grant
$500- Clothing Fund
$8,024- Fall and Spring Room and Board
$3,016- Summer Room and Board
$17,040- Grand Total
Remember, this excludes any money from the Student-Athlete Opportunity Fund, the Special Assistance Fund, and any occasional meals provided by boosters. Monthly, football players are looking at $1,420 cash in their pocket without having to buy books or pay tuition and fees. Did you have $1,420 of cash every month in college? If football players were to work a job paying a respectable $10 an hour, they would need to work 36 hours a week for 50 weeks to make $1,420 before taxes to make what they get from their football scholarship and other available money sources."*
So what? That doesn’t mean they need to go to college. If they weren’t physically prepared to suit up for an NFL game, they wouldn’t be on the field. The argument that players need to wait three years because they need to be “protected” is moronic on its face.
Sure, most kids probably aren’t physically capable of playing NFL football at 18. Fine; they won’t play. Some are, and it doesn’t make any sense to prevent them from doing so.
The NFL doesn’t require a college degree. That’s the whole point. It just requires players to wait three years after high school graduation (or after they would have graduated).
Ho hum. Spin it any way you want. The fact is that college football serves the same function that other college endeavors serve - for some, it’s just an opportunity to play the game, and lots of kids know they will never go professional. For others, it’s serious career preparation, both in terms of potential play, and for future sports management, etc. careers. The college experience is essential.
Practically, of course, this means that they pretty much have to go to college. If they wait three years, they most likely will spend those three years not playing football on any kind of serious, organized level. Thus, the college experience once again provides career preparation. Funny about that, huh?
Except for the fact that the colleges are earning millions in revenue. It’s not merely preparation; it’s actual performance of a job that is bringing in cash. They should have a right to bargain for a portion of that cash without being blocked by a collusive cartel.
Eliminate the NCAA and its collusion, and doubtless many athletes would consider the free tuition a good deal and take it. But for those who don’t consider it enough, they should be allowed to go to other schools and challenge them to give them a better offer.
The question is not whether the student-athletes are getting anything in return for their performance. The issue is that the colleges have colluded to decide as a group what they’re going to get. That’s the part that should be put to an end.