I don’t see why whether a sport is a money maker or not matters. If the football team is a revenue producer, but all or most of that revenue is spent on the football team,then it contributes little financially to the college as a whole,and in fact, seems to be a semi-professional team using the colleges facilities. If the revenues are spent throughout the athletic department, then why not fund male and female teams proportionately? And if that means there are fewer scholarships for males,so be it. I’m not entirely sure what the justification is for a college giving scholarships based on anything other than academic ability anyway.I’ve certainly never heard of sports organizations giving scholarships based on academic ability rather than athletic achievement.
Football doesn’t spend all of its money on football. It basically funds all other sports. It is the only revenue producer at many schools. Men’s basketball usually makes money also. At some schools men’s baseball and women’s basketball make money. It is never anywhere near enough to fund an entire athletic budget. However, the revenue issue is not the main issue of my argument with Title IX.
The issue is not the same for every school. At rich schools like The University of Texas, money is not the problem. They would like to add men’s sports like wrestling or hockey or volleyball. They can not simply because there are no viable womens sports to add to keep them in compliance with Title IX.
At poor schools, the first program to go is always men’s non revenue producing sports. They will never drop a women’s sport.
However, there are other big problems in my mind. Men’s basketball receives less scholarships than women’s basketball. Men’s baseball receives less scholarships than women’s softball. The same goes for track and field. All of this is done because they must keep the total number of scholarships somewhat equal. Football with its 85 scholarships makes this difficult to do. There are no comparable women’s sports to football.
Colleges are theoretically about learning. School newspapers, for example, are funded by the school as both publications and as learning tools. Now, lets say that we have a school with seperate mens and womens newspapers. And lets say on (the women’s) is more popular with the public and makes a modest profit. Should we fund that one more? Of course not…both newpapers, deserve equal resources, because both groups deserve equal learning tools.
And if sports are not learning tools, why, pray tell, are our schools still funding them?
This kind of comment makes me a little crazy. It’s not like having athletics takes money away from the education money. Athletics creates revenue and creates alumni donations. At almost every single school this is way more than enough to fund the athletic department. Having an athletic department will most likely increase alumni donations to the education departments. For instance, big athletic donor Red McCombs at the University of Texas has recently donated over 50 million dollars to the school of business. I would say there is a very good chance he would not have done that if there was no football team. Also, most universities give extra athletic perks to alumni who donate to the school. If you donate to the Texas Exes (the UT alumni association) you are able to receive better football tickets, parking passes, and have a place to go before and after the game. I guarantee that they would receive a hell of a lot less if there was no football team.
What if they just mixed the sexes in every sport?
Marc
Well call me sexist, but I would bet that there would not be any women participating if this was the case. This is clearly not the desired outcome, so we should not mix the sexes.
So if football and its 85 scholarships is throwing the Title IX compliance out of whack, than all a school has to do is declare that football is a co-educational sport and the problem is solved.
Of course, there will be the separate problem of Woody Hayes rising from the grave and punching out any male who lost his scholarship to a chick, but so what?
Sure. Another answer is to have schools stop givving football scholarships. Then all of the other man’s and women’s teams could be balanced in scholarships.
But TexasSpur would rather present a comparison of man’s basketball vs. women’s basketball as if those 85 football scholarships didn’t exist. Hey – if you have a ppol of scholarships and you “spend” 85 of them on football, you have fewer left over for the other sports. That isn’t inequity, it’s a choice of priorities.
I don’t know if you are being completely ignorant or what. Here is my exact quote:
Do I not say that football’s 85 scholarships makes this difficult to do? Where in the world am I pretending that football’s scholarships don’t exist? Honestly, what is your problem? You are clearly not looking at this issue with any kind of objectivity. This is the second time in this thread that you have clearly misrepresented me.
Here is inequity: you have many more men competing for men’s scholarships than you have women competing for women’s scholarships. Therefore, it is clearly easier for a woman to receive an athletic scholarship than a man to receive one.
TexasSpur
I’m sorry you feel I have misrepresented you. Allow me to rephrase:
You present a comparison between men’s baseball and women’s softball scholarships. You note that they are unequal, and present this as evidence of a problem. The assumption underlying this position is that equity in scholarships should be evaluated between like sports, rather than as a combined pool. Since you have predicated that no women’s analog for football scholarships exist, this is equivalent to pretending that those scholarships do not exist when evaluating the equity of scholarship distribution.
If you still feel that is a miosrepresentation, please detail exactly which step does not represent your position.
Clearly? Please support your clear peception with some clear examples.
Many more men than women competing for scholarships? At what level. You can’t be talking about college students, since the application of Title IX that you are criticising is the requirement that scholarshipos be proporttional to teh representation in the student body. In society? No. Women make up more than 50% of the population as a whole. Within a paricular demographic group? Which group? How persistent is the trend? Are you advocating that scholarship ratios should be adjusted each year based upon the demographics of the entering class of students?
Or is your argument that many more men are presently enjoying the benefits of college athletics and thus they deserve a larger portion of the scholarship pool? If so, I would have to again answer “no” to the question in your OP, since that is exactly the situation which TItle IX was designed to ameliorate.
I guess this is another issue on which we do not share the same view of “clearly”.