College coaches make a ton of money because schools can afford to pay them. I’d be curious to know the difference in yearly revenue and donations for Michigan when they sucked compared to now with Jim Harbaugh. How much does winning help?
As for the elimination of college athletics, I don’t agree. I do, however, think that a minor league football organization could be successful. I can’t understand why such a thing doesn’t exist.
Baseball, obviously, has a very extensive minor league system. Basketball is so big globally that not-quite-good-enough-for-the-NBA players can still make a lot of money playing overseas. But football has the NFL and nothing else, professionally.
It used to be that the NFL could use college football as a “free” developmental league. But now, with the draft near, all you hear is how college football these days isn’t preparing players for the NFL.
This is a really silly argument. Actually, strike that. It’s not really an argument at all; more like an ad hominem attack in place of an argument.
I have no doubt that a percentage of top college football and basketball players act in an immature fashion, and might have a sense of entitlement. But since when has that been a disqualifier for receiving a salary? There are plenty of immature, entitled assholes in the pro sports. There are plenty in Silicon Valley. There are plenty in finance and law and medicine.
How is it that these young players are apparently mature and committed enough to handle the pressures of playing every weekend, as well as doing their academic work, but are (in your view and Sweeney’s) too immature and entitled to receive payment? There are some reasonable arguments to be made on both sides of the debate over paying college athletes, but “they’re entitled and immature so they shouldn’t be paid” is only an argument made by people with no actual ideas.
LOL at your idea of a revenue system.
It is true that students pay fees to attend universities, and that constitutes revenue. But, in the vast majority of public universities (which make up a majority of D1 football and basketball schools), increasing student enrollment does not simply mean a big fat cash cow. In fact, there are a significant number of public universities nationwide that actually LOSE money every time they allow increased enrollment, because these public universities rely on state subsidies, and if the subsidies go up more slowly than costs, then growing enrollment can result in LESS money per student and a greater strain on financial resources.
This has been happening in the California public university system for a while, both in the UC and the CSU system. Even the second-tier CSU where i teach, which is considered less prestigious than the top CSU schools like San Diego State, and much less prestigious than places like UCLA or Berkeley, has no trouble filling all of our available student places every year. We turn away a bunch of potential students, and we have no D1 sports at all.
When it comes to our revenue, student demand is actually a headache, because we’re in a growing region and more and more people want to come here every year, but the state of California doesn’t increase our budget sufficiently to keep up with the demand. While student tuition has been rising over the past decade, in-state tuition still only covers about 75% of the cost of a student’s education, with the rest of the bill being footed by the California taxpayers. We turn people away every year, and this happens at state schools all over the country.
As for your assertion about Florida Gulf Coast University, maybe the reason you “don’t have a cite for it” is that your alleged spike in enrollment never happened. Gathering year-by-year figures from FGCU’s own website, i put together a table and graph of the university’s total student enrollment from Fall 2000 through Fall 2015. here are the numbers:
The university had its big NCAA run in 2013, although it did not, as you claim, go to the Final Four; the team made it to the Sweet Sixteen. Maybe you can point out to me, on the table or the graph provided, the place where “their attendance shot way up in the subsequent years”?
It looks to me that FGCU’s attendance history is one of fairly consistent increases over the last fifteen years. I see absolutely no evidence that its basketball success in 2013 made an appreciable impact on its enrollment numbers.
Interestingly, the FGCU enrollment numbers are pretty similar to those of my own university. And coincidentally, the two universities were only founded two years apart: mine in 1989, and FGCU in 1991. Both institutions demonstrate a pattern quite common to relatively new universities: strong and consistent growth in student enrollment over an extended period of time, reflecting broader national trends in the demand for higher education.
Cutting your quote in half since the latter half of everything was proving me wrong, admittedly I was wrong about those and will admit as such.
What made you think that that was my only argument against it? I was simply agreeing with Sweeney’s assertions, I never said that it was end-all-be-all argument against paying college players.
There are myriad reasons against paying them, their immaturity is only part of it. There’s the issue of distributing the pay between players in the same sport, players on other sports, men’s sports, women’s sports etc.; whether the pay is part of the scholarship or it’s own separate deal; and many more issues.
“I believe that they are immature and entitled and therefore shouldn’t be paid” doesn’t even rise to the level of rational discussion when we’re talking about labor markets and economics. You say that “their immaturity is only part of it,” but in a rational discussion it really shouldn’t even be a consideration.
This isn’t true. In order to train and compete in a sport like DI football you have little time for a true education. The players aren’t expected to take full classes, and once they’re done with eligibility or are cut they are discarded. If it were a real education you’d have something, but it’s not. It can be for exceptional student athletes but in general there is no support system or expectations for them to get a real useful education. Very few coaches are sympathetic to a player who needs to skip practice in order to study.
Only a small percentage of NCAA D1 players make it in the pros. The rest get no education, many (most?) don’t even get a degree, and don’t get paid a dime while everyone else around them benefits from the system.
What makes you so sure of all that? Plenty of them get college degrees; from what I can tell, the defining characteristic is whether they consider themselves there to actually get a degree or not.
Take some kid out of a low income urban environment that doesn’t value education, and certainly has little concept of advanced degrees, and throw that kid into a D1 football program, and he’s liable to do as little as he can to stay in school so he can play ball and get a shot at the pros. But take a upper middle class kid who planned on going to college anyway, and who also happens to be a good football player and put him in the same position, and that kid is liable to get that degree and go on with his life much as he might have anyway.
Okay, I understand that there is some benefit to having a physical education program, but I really fail to see any reason to have sports leagues in college at all. It distracts the students from learning, which is what they should be focusing on.
At the very least, games shouldn’t be televised. Or the TV station should be required to spend as much time broadcasting the graduation ceremonies, scholastic competitions, etc as they do the physical games.
There are indeed a few reasons for not allowing college athletes to cash in on their market value. No real good ones, however, and the way they might spend their earnings is possibly the worst one of all. It’s way past time to put aside the idea that college athletes are uniquely harmed by making money from their endeavors.
You don’t just learn things from books and lectures.
[QUOTE=bunp]
What makes you so sure of all that? Plenty of them get college degrees; from what I can tell, the defining characteristic is whether they consider themselves there to actually get a degree or not.
Take some kid out of a low income urban environment that doesn’t value education, and certainly has little concept of advanced degrees, and throw that kid into a D1 football program, and he’s liable to do as little as he can to stay in school so he can play ball and get a shot at the pros.
[/QUOTE]
This isn’t it. Colleges are taking kids from academically underserved areas who aren’t qualified to be in college anyway, then working them on a practice/film/weights schedule that severely restricts the classes that they can take, and then providing them with “academic advisors” who actively work against the students’ interests by steering them away from classes that conflict with practice and into classes where the workload is minimal, the professors malleable, and which don’t add up to any degree at all.
The schools are actively complicit in promising these kids an education and then working specifically to deny them that education behind their backs.
Student-athletes are exploited, and if you believe that they aren’t, then you haven’t read enough.
Even if seven figure salaries are necessary to hire a coach, I think there’s still a valid issue of whether it should be done. If a private university wants to pay that kind of money, it’s on them. But public universities are government entities. Should the tax payers of Massachusetts have had to pay Derek Kellogg’s salary, even if he had produced a winning season every year? I feel there were a lot of better things a million dollars could have been spent on. Or not spent at all.
Excellent code-word deployment there! Kudos. A low-income urban environment is different from a low-income suburban or rural environment, right? I can’t quite put my finger on the most obvious distinction, but i’m sure it will come to me eventually.
Exactly.
Say, for a moment, that we accept bump’s premise that kids from low-income backgrounds, or environments that don’t value education, are likely to have a different approach to college than kids from comfortable backgrounds that do value education. I don’t think that, by itself, is necessarily too difficult to believe, although i still wonder why it’s apparently only “urban” poor kids with the bad attitude.
But i digress.
Even if we do, in fact, observe such a discrepancy in the attitude to education, this begs one of the very questions we’re considering here, which is: how SHOULD the actual colleges approach this issue?
After all, as the providers of athletic scholarships, the colleges have the authority, and a clear opportunity, to shape the attitudes and the approaches of their young athletes. The colleges (along with the NCAA) lay down a whole bunch of pretty strict rules that athletes are supposed to follow, and colleges have also been pretty quick to take athletic scholarships away from athletes who fuck up in particular ways. Unfortunately, it seems that the most likely reason for a lost athletic scholarship is poor on-field performance or a long-term injury. Poor academic performance is often “corrected” by cheating, or by placing pressure on the player’s academic advisers or his professors.
Why can’t the colleges use their authority in these cases to actually try and change the alleged poor attitudes of the kids who aren’t very interested in college? I would be willing to bet that, if a D1 school, with the full support of the athletics department and the coaching staff, set a serious ultimatum connecting a player’s place on the team with his commitment to his education, you could very quickly find yourself with a team full of keen students.
But they don’t. Instead, they pay lip-service to the educational component of college football and basketball, and do everything possible to make sure that the players are full-time athletes with as few outside distractions as possible. In the worst cases, they work with academic departments to obtain passing grades for athletes who never even turn up for class, they provide people to write papers for athletes, and they put pressure on professors and academic advisers to overlook sub-standard academic performances. And even when overt dishonesty isn’t happening, they make clear to the players that their main purpose on campus is to play ball, and that everything else, including scholarly achievement or career advancement, is subservient to that purpose.
Of course, a serious attitude to academics would probably mean that a number of D1 athletes would never enter the university in the first place, or would flunk out pretty quickly. Even if they try their hardest, some of them probably just aren’t ready for the academic challenges of university education. That is true, unfortunately, outside the population of college athletes as well. A significant number of universities, including my own, are admitting students who just don’t have the educational background to cope with college-level work.
While i agree that, in our society, it is appropriate to make distinctions between public and private universities, we don’t even need to do that, because there are possible solutions to this problem that don’t even require a concern with whose money is being spent.
One interesting possibility is laid out by Andrew Zimbalist in the article quoted upthread by Kimstu. Zimbalist does not argue for paying the players; in fact, he explicitly states that this is not the solution. Instead, he argues that the NCAA, or some other “governing body” (possibly, i guess, the government), should wield its big stick in the coaching market in a manner similar to the way it does in the playing market.
The NCAA says that you can’t pay the players. What would happen, Zimbalist asks, if the NCAA also placed a cap on coaches’ salaries? Say, 3x the national average for a tenured professor, which would give coaches a ceiling of somewhere around $450,000 per year.
Of course, the first response to this is: what about market forces? If Nick Saban or Jim Harbaugh can’t make $5 million a year, they won’t coach Alabama or Michigan, and good coaches will leave the college game.
But, as Zimbalist notes, where would they go? Who else, apart from a money-making football team, is going to hire a football coach? I guess it’s possible that some corporation might be willing to pay these guys a seven-figure salary for their sparkling personalities and their managerial skills, but i wouldn’t bet on it. As Zimbalist notes:
And none of this would necessarily have any downward pressure on the quality of college football, or on the income that colleges derive from football. The fact that college football is so huge, and so good, even without paying the players, seems a good indication of this. Americans have made clear that they love their college football, and i don’t think that’s going to change if Nick Saban is making six figures instead of seven. And the lower salaries at the top would put downward pressure on salaries throughout the coaching and administrative ranks of college sports, which would leave more money to be spent on other things, including, perhaps, more and better athletic scholarship in football and in other sports.
As Zimbalist notes, however, such a system would probably require some sort of anti-trust exemption, because limiting salaries like this would be a restraint on trade. It’s OK for the NCAA and its colleges to collude in order to radically underpay the athletes, because they’re officially students and not employees, but you probably can’t do it to the coaches without a legal exemption.
My point was that if you take a kid from a low income environment that doesn’t value education and drop him in some college somewhere, he doesn’t have the tools to succeed. Similarly, if you take a kid from a background where education is valued and without all the hindrances that come with poverty, and that kid does have the tools to succeed in college. Being a student athlete only makes it more difficult, regardless of background. And culture comes with its own baggage.
Personally, I think that student-athletes should have to meet the same admission standards that anyone else does to get into that school. Problem is, you can’t have a school with high admissions standards and excellent academic performance- too many of the best athletes come from those disadvantaged backgrounds that I mentioned above.
Indeed. And this is compounded by the fact that the NFL has limits as to when these players can be drafted - in order that college football becomes their de facto minor leagues. If there was a true NFL minor league system, I’d imagine that quite a significant amount of these players would opt for that over college. Look at the NBA (though I acknowledge the physical requirements make it different for jumping directly from high school to the pros) - they had an issue with the best high school players being able to directly jump to the pros from high school and be successful, so they put an artificial 1 year in college limit.
The education part is all a ruse for the big time players (unless they really want to fight to get one). For a lot of them college sports is merely part of the pathway to the pros. And in that regard pretending that you are paying them with an education is a pretty ridiculous narrative.
Oh, were you implying the practice is limited to athletics? Hardly.
The “gotta havea degree” culture has reached the point where the truly qualified students still go to truly worthy universities and often pay a very reasonable amount overall to do so, with scholarships and grants recognizing their elite standing and potential.
Everyone else pays a fortune to go to a second-rate wannabe school to get a piece of paper that says they’re bettered somehow. But they have a lot of fun appearing on national TV when the camera sweeps the stadium seats at the Big Game.
I agree that the expansion of higher education has had some problematic results, and that, in many ways, the pressure to HAVE a degree has become more important than the intellectual content of the degree itself. It has also resulted in the admission of many students who really aren’t prepared for the academic and intellectual rigor of proper university studies.
But it’s not as simple as you suggest.
First, there are plenty of students in the lower-tier universities who are outstanding students. I went to grad school at Johns Hopkins, where i had to teach as part of my fellowship, so i’m well aware of the intellectual standards of undergrads at the top schools. I teach in the second tier of the California public university system (the CSU), and i’ve had some students in my classes who would have fit in just fine at Hopkins, or at just about any other university. The best of my students are smart enough to go anywhere.
Also, somewhat connected with that, is the fact that a good student can, if they’re interested in taking the best advantage of the opportunities, get an excellent education at a second-tier school. The faculty on my campus, and on hundreds of other similar campuses across the country, got their grad degrees at outstanding graduate schools, and do a excellent job of teaching undergraduates. An undergrad who is smart and who works hard and who is willing to push him- or herself can get a lot out of these places.
Also, your apparent connection of “second-rate wannabe school” with sporting success is silly. Plenty of the biggest and most successful sporting schools are also outstanding academic institutions, even while they probably also admit a bunch of underqualified students. I have friends who teach at places like Texas A&M and Ohio State and Michigan. They take seriously their intellectual and academic responsibility, and set rigorous standards in their classes, even while recognizing that some of their students are underprepared for college.
Yes, but Joe Layabout paying retail has a chance to earn a degree that Joe Athlete does not, because there is no representative of the school actively sabotaging Joe Layabout’s chances by exploiting Joe Athlete’s trust in order to put him in classes that will never earn him a degree, even if he spends four years with a full course load.
Joe Layabout isn’t going to worthwhile classes because he doesn’t want to. Joe Athlete isn’t going to worthwhile classes because they are being hidden or kept from him by the school.
Do you really believe that athletes who *want *to take real classes are hidden from them by universities? My impression is athletes who take joke classes do so because they want to or because they would not be able to keep decent grades in real classes.
Of course I really believe that. I really believe that because I am a former NCAA athlete (in a non-revenue sport, no less) and I was pressured to take classes outside my major, of no value toward graduation, that did not interfere with practice.
These are the academic institutions themselves taking advantage of the disparity of wealth, power, and knowledge, and LYING to athletes who trust them- lying in order to keep exploiting their free labor in order to make millions upon billions of dollars. The “education” that the institution promises in exchange for their service as cogs in the money making machine is a lie.
I, too, had a (relatively brief) college athletic experience at a D1 school. My experience was not like yours and I never heard any similar stories from other athletes I knew in any sport.