<p>I think the larger issue here is the impact of intercollegiate athletics on colleges and universities. One definative scholarly work on this is "The Game of Life" by Bowen and Shulman. Their conclusions are startling and contradict many held beliefs. I believe that one of the authors was Princeton's Prexy at one time.</p>
<p>While the do not sugar coat the hypocracies of Div 1 athletics they contend that the adverse impact on smaller Div 3 colleges may be even greater. How so? I graduated from Ohio State, a big Div 1 university. Ohio State fields teams in 30 sports involving approximately 1000 students. That is less than 3% of the undergraduate student body. In addition, the revenues from football and basketball help subsidize the rest of the interscholastic athletic program. Overall, the graduation rate of these athletes is slighly HIGHER that the overall student body and more than two thirds of these athletes have HS records comparable to the overall student body. Obviously there is a different story with the football, basketball and hockey recruits. Yes hockey too.</p>
<p>Now look at a college such as Williams. It fields 31 intercollegiate teams, one more than Ohio State, involving about 750 students, or about 35% of the student body. Though it does not offer athletic scholarships, Williams does recruit athletes for it teams. The Bowen and Shulman book also has data on over 90,000 students showing that in almost all sports(I think fencing and golf were the exceptions) the academic quality of student athletes was inferior to the overall student body. The same held true for class standing and graduation rates. And because they cannot offer athletic scholarship the gaps in SAT scores between athletes and non-athletes are higher in some sports, particularly hockey and wrestling, than at Div 1 universities.</p>
<p>So one of their conclusions is that the elite colleges and univerisities are more adversely impacted by intercollegiate athletics than large Div 1 universities are. I knew of only three athletes in my classes at OSU, Mike Good a golfer, Keith Swearingen a baseball player and Dave Foley a football player who played in the NFL for many years and was a MechEngineer. There were undoubtedly a number of others in my lecture classes, I just wasn't aware of them. Mike, Dave and Keith were all good students so they had absolutely no adverse impact on my academics. In fact Mike was in the combined BS/MS program.</p>