<p>Study. No matter how gifted an athlete u are, u are an injury away from having nothing.</p>
My son’s entire recruiting class has stats equal to or higher than your stats (stats you published on another thread). I wouldn’t make assumptions about these athletes unless you really know their ACT, GPA, etc. Unfortunately, schools like UNC and Notre Dame cast athletes in a bad light lately. However, most athletes that I know have serious stats and the significant extra-curricular to go along with it.
Those athletes bring in more money to the school than 4 years of you paying tuition out-of-pocket.
@yolohyfr: the OP, in my opinion is over-generalizing. Don’t you fall into the same trap by over-generalizing the opposite position. VERY few college athletes participate in programs that are net revenue generators for their colleges. There are 420,000 current NCAA athletes. Net earning programs probably fall under a hundred (some Mens Div 1 FB, some Mens hoops – maybe a few womens hoops pgms)
@T26E4: They may not generate direct revenue, but those athletes improve the school’s image and publicity (especially when they win). I’m going to assume that universities are able to generate their own numbers and can make their own decisions about increasing or decreasing the amount of athletic scholarships they give out… depending on how well the program is doing. This is all relative to the OP’s mentioning of top tier schools, in which he probably feels that those athletes are “taking away” spots from the “academics”. The athletic programs of those big name schools most likely DO rake in the dough. Even the term “ivy league” has athletic roots.
In the case of NCAA Division II schools, I believe that the application stats of athletes are comparable to the academic students (they have the same chance of getting in anyway).
As a rule, there are very few athletic departments that bring in money. Most are barely solvent even when subsidized by a hefty mandatory athletics fee from every undergraduate.
Maryland, for example, was a charter member of the ACC and has had a consistently strong hoops team and intermittently strong fb. Major school, Division I programs, major state government support. But they couldn’t get their economics under control, and ended up almost forced to accept a Big 10 offer (in violation of state Open Meetings law) simply because they needed the guaranteed cut of the television contract income. (The Big 10 wanted a presence in the Baltimore-Washington media market, and Kevin Plank wanted the inroad to supply gear to the Big 10 schools and their fans; what the school, students, and state wanted were hardly even afterthoughts). Their (mandatory) athletics fee is currently $203.19 per semester, per student.
Even those schools (or programs) that do bring in revenue and donations have it pretty much all earmarked for their programs, with nothing going back to the rest of campus.
There just aren’t very many sports programs that even pay for themselves. Not even very many Div. I fb or mbb programs do.
Ideally, we should let the NFL and NBA develop and pay for their own minor leagues, and provide college athletics for those true student-athletes who are not pro caliber. Athletics do enrich the college experience for many students in many sports, just like various other activities do. They shouldn’t be cut any more than, say, the theater program or the orchestra or cultural festivals or any number of other student activities.
Why are people saying that athletes take money from scholars, that is NOT true at all… The money athletes get are never available to regular applicants, as they are “dished” out to each sport and divided upon each athletes (excluding certain sports). So athletes in top tier schools (besides the ivies, as no athletic scholarships are even given there) are not “stealing” money from scholars.
Besides, everyone in a top tier school deserves to be there, scholar or athlete. Just because they don’t completely excel in one area (but most athletes are very smart anyways) doesn’t mean they aren’t deserving.
@neonerudite I don’t recall anyone saying that athletes take money from scholars (OP broadly claimed athletes take seats away from non-athletes) – but you should be careful not to over-generalize the other extreme about resource allocation as well.
Colleges that consciously choose to have inter-collegiate sports teams have to spend money – on facilities, budgets for teams, staff, etc. These same dollars could be spent on hiring more/better faculty, upgrading bldgs, financial aid, better salary/benes for the employees, more acquisitions to the library or museum. No one can say otherwise.
So the cost/benefit analysis of sports vs. no sports is real. Resources are finite. I doubt there is a single self-sufficient all-teams sports program in the country – maybe UMich or Notre Dame? And that’s a BIG maybe.
I take that point but also wonder how many kids want to go to certain universities because they have great football or basketball teams. Anecdotally, it seems like a pretty good number of kids do factor that in. So it’s like a marketing expense with the attendant payoff, for some schools.
Why can’t athletic talent be valued the same as academic talent?
Simple as that.
^ Because universities are first and foremost academic institutions.
@moscott, some colleges offer 4-year athletic scholarships now.
@PurpleTitan
Very, very few and even then it isn’t as it seems
At the school where I teach, a lot of donors fund athletic scholarships, and that is all that the money can be spent on. If the scholarship did not exist, the money would not exist. I don’t happen to like this state of affairs, but that’s the way it works.
Ultimately, I think, this question is really a small part of the much larger question about the nature of athletics in an academic setting. Once you start making assumptions about the latter, conclusions about the former are likely to follow.
Schools don’t give automatic admissions boosts to anyone who checks the box that they play football or field hockey-- you actually have to have demonstrated talent/skill/achievement in that sport.
Contrast that to admissions boosts for other attributes like being a legacy or underrepresented demographic group. No one has to demonstrate that they are exceptionally good at being from Idaho, or good at being hispanic, or good at being a legacy.
@GMTplus7, well the legacy boost is evidently big only for those who’s parents contributed a fair amount (in some fashion) to the alma mater.
Not that that makes it much more fair (though it is slightly more logical).
Parent’s achievement is still not the applicant’s achievement, as it is for athletes.
interesting thread