<p>Cal</a> Men?s Basketball Team Deals With Low Graduation Rate CBS San Francisco</p>
<p>Odd, considering how many perks athletes get. Free tutors, professors giving them time off, extra time to turn in assignments, most of them studying easy majors.</p>
<p>Shame! Why should tax payers fund these folks - irrespecitve of ethnicity? What has athletic ability to do with economics, arts or sciences?</p>
<p>This a clever way that the pro leagues get the tax payers to spend money to train their athletes. On the same line as tax payers land up footing the bill for stadiums for the pro teams!</p>
<p>Unfortunately, it is the masses that will clamour for this system, just as the citizenry in ancient Rome did for the Gladiatorial competition - keeps the masses distracted!</p>
<p>humanx, i’m glad you made the reference to Bread and Circus - I was thinking the same thing. The pessimist in me thinks it’s only a matter of time before sh1t hits the fan.</p>
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<p>However distasteful the poor academic performance of the basketball players is, it is probably a profitable sport that subsidizes other things (presumably sports with better academic profiles among their student athletes). Of course, then the question becomes, can a basketball team be recruited and supported academically so that they will be successful in school as well as the court (since most players don’t make it into the NBA)?</p>
<p>Basketball is likely harder on academic performance than football is, due to the larger number of games (including weekday games) that will cause more missed classes and the overlap of the basketball season with both fall and spring semesters.</p>
<p>ucbalumnus is right. Sports brings in more money than your tax dollars do and help fund the rest of the university.</p>
<p>This isn’t that surprising at all. College athletes can get all the perks/help they’d like, but without time it’s all worthless. Let’s say you do skate by and graduate with C’s. Who’s hiring you?</p>
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<p>We’re not talking about a mediocre, no-name school. This is Berkeley, surely among the most famous educational brands in the world. Sure, maybe you didn’t do well while you were there, earning straight C’s. Nevertheless, I would have to imagine that you’d still be far more employable than the majority of Americans who never even graduated from college at all. </p>
<p>Nor could you be said to have earned mediocre grades due to mere laziness. You have a viable reason: you were a scholarship basketball player at a major conference school, a notoriously time-consuming endeavor. Nevertheless you still managed to earn a degree - even without the best grades and perhaps in a creampuff major - at one of the most famous schools in the world, whereas many college basketball players of major conferences never even graduate at all. Seems to me that, if nothing else, you’d be highly employable in the sports management and sports marketing industry.</p>
<p>No disagreement that the brand does mean something. You would certainly have a leg up over graduates from other schools with mediocre “stats,” let’s say. But for the most part it’s a competitive job market out there. There’s gonna be other graduates from Berkeley who devoted their time to their academics/careers and have a much better resume. There’s also the same kind of people in schools less famous than Berkeley. In either case, if you were a student athlete in an intensive sport you’ll probably have trouble competing. </p>
<p>I also have no doubt that graduating as a student athlete is no easy feat. But that might not mean anything to employers when there’s simply more qualified candidates.</p>
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<p>Does anyone have the numbers and sources?</p>
<p>I sense this is going to be one of those threads with many pages of posts thousands of words long…</p>
<p>Sports as a whole is a money loser (and is supposed to be self-supporting, even though it is not). However, football and basketball are generally money makers that subsidize the other sports, so money losing sports like baseball, gymnastics, lacrosse, and rugby were cut recently.</p>
<p>Basically, the sports that have the worst academic image problem are money makers, while those with better academic images are money losers.</p>
<p>Did jorge Gutierrez graduate?</p>
<p>Let’s not kid ourselves as to why they join a school while preparing to get drafted into pro teams - the school funds their living expenses while they are getting the needed training. And what use is a bland college degree for these athletes? </p>
<p>Now coming back to the subject of college sports funding academics, why not take the taxpayer’s fund and run a business? Universities shouldn’t get into anything other than academics and research. It is NOT a business! Higher education, just like public works is a no-short-term-profit activity. It needs to be funded by us.</p>
<p>Still trying to find out how much profit cal athletics brings in for academics and what is its share of gross revenue. In the mean time, read this:</p>
<p>[Buzz</a> Bissinger: Why College Football Should Be Banned - WSJ.com](<a href=“Buzz Bissinger: Why College Football Should Be Banned - WSJ”>Buzz Bissinger: Why College Football Should Be Banned - WSJ)</p>
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<p>I would argue that that’s the wrong comparison to make. The proper comparison is not between the Cal basketball player who graduates with mediocre grades vs. another Cal student (or student from another decent school) with better grades. Rather, the proper comparison is between that Cal player who graduates with mediocre grades vs. that very same player who never even graduates at all. As discussed in the thread, only a small minority of players from Cal (or anywhere else) will make it to the NBA or other lucrative pro leagues. The rest of the players will have to enter a professional world where you basically need a college degree to be competitive for most decent jobs. Whether you have top grades is a relatively minor matter compared to having a degree at all. And, let’s be perfectly honest, without the college basketball system, many basketball players would never have even gone to college at all, let alone to a top-branded one like Cal. </p>
<p>To give you an analogy: no matter how much we exercise and eat more healthily, we will still surely never be as fit as Michael Phelps. So does that mean that we should simply give up? Seems to me that that’s not the relevant comparison - the relevant comparison being whether our fitness will improve relative to ourselves if we don’t exercise and eat healthily. </p>
<p>The upshot is that, at least for me, I think it’s hard to make the case that the vast majority of Cal players who won’t become successful pros wouldn’t be better off if they graduated. For the purposes of employment, having a degree, even with poor grades, is still far better than not even having a degree at all.</p>
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<p>Regarding this question, the relevant comparison, and hence the true source of controversy, seems to be Cal basketball’s academic performance relative to other college basketball programs. Seems to me that most other programs - including national champion Kentucky - graduated more than 0% of its black players. While perhaps one could then retort that perhaps Kentucky is a relatively low-ranked school that might simply have plenty of creampuff courses that allow players to graduate with minimal effort (as if Berkeley’s ‘Studies’ majors aren’t also creampuffy), I would point out that other academically top-ranked schools who compete in major basketball conferences such as Stanford, UCLA, Michigan, Northwestern, Duke, Vanderbilt, Virginia, Notre Dame all graduate more than 0% of its black players (and also generally graduate a greater percentage of all its players regardless of race than does Cal). If those other schools can do that, why not Cal?</p>
<p>Perhaps they all went pro…</p>
<p>It’s similar to the football team now. Some players just falter in their first years of school. Some may be taking “easy” majors but that in no way means it’s going to be a cake walk. On the other side of the road, you can point at the coaches for recruiting students who may not be “Cal” material academically. All in all, this is a big problem for the university and something that needs to be checked with much more scrutiny.</p>
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<p>Um, last time I checked, Cal basketball wasn’t exactly a major producer for pro basketball players, certainly relative to powerhouses such as Duke or Kentucky.</p>