IMO major college sports are a racket.
The students don’t get an actual education.
Per NCAA rules, they don’t get any money to live on, can’t even be taken out to meals by anyone affiliated with the school.
Meanwhile, the school makes hundreds of thousands of dollars off them.
Not. Cool.
What’s up fellow RPI buddy!
RPI has a marketing program? Huh…when I was there, most of the hockey players were management majors.
Some college football programs make money. A few college basketball programs are profitable. Every other sport though costs the school money. There are only a handful of college athletic programs that are profitable overall, most of them spend a lot more money than they take in.
As far as getting an education, athletes are in the same boat as every other college student. You can get an education if you want to, but it’s not mandatory.
There have been some solid academic studies on this topic. Probably the best and broadest of these are two books, one by Bowen and Levin and one by Bowen and Shulman.
The ultimate conclusion is that recruited athletes tend to be weak students at admission, and then under-perform their entering credentials (a football player with 1000 SATs is likely to perform worse than a non-football player with the same score). This is true both at liberal arts colleges and Division I. To a lesser extent, this holds among non-recruited athletes. They do note that the problem is focused primarily in the high profile sports (football, basketball, and I think ice hockey).
It’s a mixed bag and looking at statistics does little really tell the story.
There are plenty of terrible student-athletes who coast and get special treatment. There are plenty of terrible student-students who coast and get passed through by taking ridiculously easy class loads and/or buying answers and cheating. If you don’t want to study and you want to stay in school, for sports or to party and do drugs, you can usually find a way to get through. Colleges generally speaking allow the students to take as much as they wish from it, it’s relatively easy to cheat on homework and take large lecture classes where having someone else take the exam is essentially un-policible. With a little money, some close friends and a real aversion to actual work just about anyone can graduate college if you don’t care what the degree is in. Stories like Dexter Manley’s are great reads, but there are countless regular students who graduate with sub-high school level knowledge.
The athletics department, for all it’s flaws, does allow poor and underachieving students an opportunity to get an education that they otherwise wouldn’t get. A higher proportion of those who fit that description probably fail, but that’s not really the point. Look at it from the other side, what proportion of socio-economically comparable high school students who don’t get into college due to athletics get degrees? Get educations? Stay out of prison? Lead productive lives and careers?
If 50% of athletes get educations and have careers, as opposed to say 70% of regular students who entered with sound academic credentials, I’d say that that 50% is a success story. Because perhaps 30% of that 50% would otherwise be a drain on society in one way or another. Additionally a proportion of those athletes who fall into the failing 50% are probably better off for their experience than otherwise too. They’ve been exposed to a better way of life and learned the value of hard work. They’ve seen ideals to strive for in college and networked with people from all walks of life to broaden their horizons and better acclimate themselves to a less isolated life in the ghetto. Ask yourself how many of those athletes who fail out of college are still better off than their High School peers who never even got a chance to go to college and live on a college campus.
As a school sport rugby union is mostly confined here to the private schools. As a result its university players tend to study medicine, law, finance, engineering etc.
Andy Katzenmoyer.
There is suspicion that Katzenmoyer got some preferential treatment and his grades boosted, but I’ve never heard any stories about him being especially dumb. Being a cheater, whether he actually was or not, doesn’t make you dumb.
I always thought Vince Young was a great example. Got a 6 on the Wonderlic (inadequate denials notwithstanding). Even listening to him talk makes you wonder how he made it through three years at Texas.
When did they decide to give a break in college admissions to certain types of players?
They’ve been getting help ever since there was a college system. Before football there was probably plenty of preferential given to sons of Presidents and other political and marketable wannabe students. Universities have been competing since they were invented, it just so happens that nowadays sports gets you in the papers more than everything else.
My bet would be 1906, when the NCAA was formed, and college administrations took control (along with ticket revenue) of what had become a huge business away from the student associations who had been running it.
Ain’t nothin’ new here, folks.
Strictly speaking, they could only have been competing since the second one was invented.
It could very well have been management; it started with an “m” and was in the school that everybody else pointed-and-laughed at.
(my bolding)
You’ve got it right, THAT statistic (graduation rates for non-basketball non-football) could be really nice.
I went to a seminar one term with David Kirk. One of the smartest people I have ever been in a room with.
At least a hundred years ago, if you believe a famous James Thurber short story.
In it is the account of an Ohio State football player who “although he was not dumber than an ox, he was not any smarter”. In class one day he is called on by the professor to name a form of transportation. Although the player is given broad hints, thinks very very hard and turns red, he cannot come up with an answer. His fellow students, aware that he’s a star on the offensive line, try to help out by making train noises (one doing a fine imitation of a train whistle). Eventually he is coaxed into responding “Train” and everyone relaxes.
Wow, awesome article, thanks. By the way, Al-Abdulla sent me scurrying from an engineering degree to a computer science degree in two classes. Still turned out okay,I guess. I’m no Don Davey though. 
Glad I wasn’t going to Wisconsin during the Morton era. Unfortunately my family had season tickets at the time so I still had to suffer through it.
2 anecdotes from my undergraduate days:
Basketball wunderkind, made the cover of Sports Illustrated, and then failed miserably in the pros and ended up playing basketball in France, of all places. I shared an anthropology class with him, never saw him once in class, and I was in line behind him when we sold our textbooks back to the bookstore. His was still in the plastic wrapping. Nevertheless, he passed, and wasn’t some sort of savant.
I was taking some secondary education classes in a summer semester, and had a professor who specilized in teaching reading. One day we showed up to class to find a note that class was cancelled for 1 week, then taught by a TA for the next week. Found out later that he was special tutoring two Junior basketball players who transfered from Jr. College but were functionally illiterate.
I did have athlete friends who were great students. I was in the honors program with a skiier and a couple of rugby players, and had a few football playing friends who were wicked smart. I was even more impressed with them because their practice schedules were very demanding, but they managed to keep up with the academics well.
There’s a reason why Myron Rolle gets NY Times articles. In another I remember reading, he was told BY HIS COACH (I forget where or at what point) he was paying too much attention to school.