<p>Well timed for this particular CC debate, this Inside Higher Ed article - related to the "Early Admissions Loophole" article previously posted - addresses the complex problems related to big-time college athletics, best practices, and reform:</p>
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For much of the past decade, and especially in the five years since Myles Brand became the first college president to lead the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the sports group has focused its efforts on passing rules aimed at ensuring that athletes in big-time sports programs get a meaningful education.</p>
<p>How successful those efforts have been is a matter of some debate: NCAA officials believe theyve made serious progress, citing the associations new system of punishing academically underperforming teams and the steadily rising graduation rates for athletes in Division I. Some faculty leaders arent so sure, arguing that on too many campuses, a wide gulf exists between the academic credentials and classroom experiences of athletes and other students.</p>
<p>But if NCAA officials and their critics disagree about how effective the academic reforms have been, they concur on one point: Getting a grip on academic issues may have been the easy part, compared to the much more difficult challenge of trying to wrestle the financial situation in big-time sports to the ground. As the costs of Division I sports programs have escalated at two to three times the rate of their colleges other spending, and institutional subsidies to sports programs grow apace, NCAA efforts to pass legislation to control costs have run into a buzzsaw of campus opposition and a bigger problem: potential violations of federal antitrust law. What to do?</p>
<p>On Monday, Brand and other NCAA leaders, in a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, unveiled the associations answer: A report by a task force of 50 college presidents that calls for individual campus presidents in conjunction with their governing boards, faculties and others to take reform home: to step forward and ensure on their own campuses both the financial integrity of their sports programs and the fuller integration of sports programs with the rest of the campus.</p>
<p>The solution is at the campus level institution by institution and under the leadership of presidents and chancellors, institutions must stress accountability in fiscal matters, Brand said in his speech.</p>
<p>As is his custom, Brand was, even as he called for reform, overwhelmingly bullish on the state of college sports. (The fact was not lost on many of those in the room that his speech came as a deadline looms early next month for the NCAA to respond to a Congressmans critical questions about whether college sports continues to deserve its tax-exempt status.) There is no crisis in intercollegiate athletics, he said. Some would argue that intercollegiate athletics, because of its enormous popularity, is at the height of success. Stadiums and arenas are full, and new facilities are coming on line; viewership is increasing. Indeed, college sports is doing remarkably well. ...</p>
<p>The NCAAs ability to attack the problem at the national level is seriously hampered, the task force said in its report, by federal antitrust laws that have been used in the past to fight other NCAA efforts to control colleges costs. In 1999, for example, the association paid $54.5 million to settle a lawsuit brought by a category of assistant coaches whose pay its members had voted to restrict. Although some legal experts have suggested that the NCAA seek an exemption to federal antitrust laws, the task force concluded that the prospects of such an exemption is weak.</p>
<p>Institutions would also balk at broad efforts to tell them how they should spend their money, the task force concluded. It is no more reasonable to establish national policy through the NCAA for how athletics dollars are allocated than it would be to drive academic budgets or program decisions for each campus through mandates from the American Council on Education or the various academic associations with which institutions are affiliated, its report said.</p>
<p>What the NCAA can do, Brand and the task force argue, is to arm campus leaders with the best possible financial information to guide their decision making, using a new accounting system under which sports programs would be required to report financial information to the NCAA using a common set of definitions aimed at teasing out more precisely what colleges spend on sports programs. For the first time, the reports would include capital expenditures and athletics departments indirect share of costs, for such things as energy and security, that might be borne by the institutions. Campuses would have to get independent, third-party verification of the accuracy and completeness of the data they submit.</p>
<p>That new system, combined with a set of other financial reporting requirements, would arm presidents with clear, concise and comparable data with which to make informed and thoughtful decisions. But then they must use it, the task force said, with the goal of ensuring that athletics expenditures fall into line with other spending on campuses. Presidents must use these data to align athletics budgeting with institutional mission to to strengthen the enterprise, the task force wrote. In effect, this is where presidential leadership and institutional accountability take hold.
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