<p>Those are too broad to be meaningful. The concentrations are not evenly distributed.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Enough students, especially males, are silly to make it true:
[Study:</a> Having a Winning Football Team Hurts Male Students’ Grades](<a href=“http://stateimpact.npr.org/ohio/2011/12/20/study-having-a-winning-football-team-hurts-male-students-grades/]Study:”>http://stateimpact.npr.org/ohio/2011/12/20/study-having-a-winning-football-team-hurts-male-students-grades/)
</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>?? They are meaningful to me. If you are going to make sweeping statements about college education in America, then you must look at the entire picture. If you want to make a statement about your D’s LAC, then that is different. If you don’t want a college composed of 25% athletes, then don’t go to that college! There are plenty of colleges that do not have any NCAA athletes at all.</p>
<p>.“The deeper harm, however, lies in the fact that, in the United States, there is a strong strain of anti-intellectualism that undervalues intellectual culture and overvalues athletics. As a result, intellectual culture receives far less support than it should, and is generally regarded as at best the idiosyncratic interest of an eccentric minority. Athletics, by contrast, is more than generously funded and embraced as an essential part of our national life.”</p>
<p>I like how this is worded. After all, who gets more attention in hs - the valedictorian or the quarterback of the football team?</p>
<p>Yes, but sports are a subset of entertainment, and entertainment in general garners a huge amount of attention in our country. Consider what passes for news in the US: Kim Kardashian having Kanye West’s baby out of wedlock. Why is this newsworthy and why should anyone care? Also very shallow is the vast majority of what gets posted on FaceBook and what gets tweeted. We have a culture that wastes time in all kinds of vain silliness, not to mention on drugs, alcohol and porn. Athletics is not even close to being the worst of what people waste time and money on, in my opinion. Rutgers wasted $32,000 on bringing Snooki to campus.</p>
<p>Since meeting daily needs for food and clothing is not a pressing issue for most of us, we have both the money and leisure time to enjoy sporting events and all other forms of entertainment on a regular basis. When the high school valedictorian does something that thousands of people are interested in watching, then s/he too will get lots of attention.</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>You are absolutely right. Some boosters try to dress up big-time college sports up as some form of education, but it’s really meant to be entertainment. The question is how in the world did so many colleges (and high schools) in the US come to decide they were in the entertainment business, in some cases at the expense of the education business?</p>
<p>Other studies show having winning teams attract more and better applicants. </p>
<p>[Research</a> finds financial impact on colleges that win football games | Inside Higher Ed](<a href=“http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/10/29/research-finds-financial-impact-colleges-win-football-games]Research”>Research finds financial impact on colleges that win football games)</p>
<p><a href=“http://are.berkeley.edu/~mlanderson/pdf/Anderson%20College%20Sports.pdf[/url]”>http://are.berkeley.edu/~mlanderson/pdf/Anderson%20College%20Sports.pdf</a></p>
<p><a href=“http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/devin.pope/research/pdf/Website_SEJ%20Sports.pdf[/url]”>http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/devin.pope/research/pdf/Website_SEJ%20Sports.pdf</a></p>
<p><a href=“Page not Found”>Page not Found;
<p>There is something INTRINSICALLY messed up w tying BIG sports to higher education, as we end up w scandal after scandal after scandal after scandal…</p>
<p>Why don’t BIG college sports have an active minor league like BASEBALL? Since baseball has a minor league, you don’t read about college baseball scandals on a regular basis.</p>
<p>If a pro sports team can have someone else pay to develop their players, then I guess it makes business sense for them. The NFL teams generate huge amounts of revenue but spend little to nothing developing players from youth to first-team squad. That’s mostly paid for by the parents of athletes and I guess taxpayers who subsidize middle and high school football, for example.</p>
<p>Here’s another thing to think about. College sports teams at the D3 level are often used to attract students. After years of participating in organized youth sports leagues, parents and students are often looking for some sort of ‘payoff’ in terms of being a college athlete. And while a scholarship to a D1 program may be nice, they aren’t that plentiful in many sports. And these D3 schools feed into that, and parents eat it up. I can’t tell you how many kids I know who have ‘signed’ with a D3 school–with a signing ceremony and everything. I wonder what in the world they are ‘signing’, since at the D3 level there is no letter of intent. But since the big boys do it…</p>
<p>So let’s say you are a small LAC of about 1500 students. If you add mens and womens lacrosse, for example, you might have 25-30 kids on the roster for each team. So that would be about 50-60 new students a year who might not have come were it not for the chance to play college sports. If your first year class is about 450 students, that represents a bit over a 10% increase in enrollment. And if you are tuition dependent, that’s a real increase in dollars.</p>
<p>I imagine there’s not so much to invest here–use the soccer field for your lacrosse field, and I imagine that you wouldn’t necessarily pay the coach that much. There would also be some travel expenses, and I guess uniforms. But if the average kid at the school is paying something like $25, 000 in net price, then that would mean you’d get about a million and a quarter in revenue. I can’t see the additional two sports teams costing that much.</p>
<p>Here are some more statistics to keep the issue in perspective:</p>
<p>There are 245 colleges in the US that play NCAA football (of any Division) [NCAA</a> Football Teams - College Football Teams, Rosters, Schedules, Stats - FOX Sports on MSN](<a href=“http://msn.foxsports.com/collegefootball/teams]NCAA”>http://msn.foxsports.com/collegefootball/teams), out of 4,500 or so total colleges in the US (degree-granting colleges - 1700 2-year colleges, and 2700 4-year colleges). [Fast</a> Facts](<a href=“http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=84]Fast”>Fast Facts: Educational institutions (84))</p>
<p>So, if you hate football and everything it stands for, you have an overwhelming number of options.</p>
<p>Of course, all of the colleges anyone on CC is interested in offers football, so why not just suck it up, learn the game, relax and enjoy it!</p>
<p>@skrlvr, the problem is w BIG-money college sports NOT little-money college sports. </p>
<p>College baseball players are in college primarily to get an education. Baseball who want primarily to pursue baseball have a viable alternate route.</p>
<p>Sure, but there’s also the college route as well for baseball players. Wasn’t the #1 MLB draft a kid from Stanford?</p>
<p>Hey, I’m all for the Steelers or the Patriots starting their own youth and development teams. But that would cost money for them…</p>
<p>However, at colleges where there are big-money (i.e. net positive income) sports, it is typically the little-money college sports that get cut when the athletic department budget is cut, since the big-money college sports subsidize the little-money college sports.</p>
<p>Well, to cut the money sports would be financial idiocy.</p>
<p>
Location…location…location…THAT’s where the value lies. So yes…by all means PLEASE have the hoards keep trampling a path and learn to enjoy it (and feel honored and elevated)in the process…while those with the desire and ability will ferret out the next ‘location’ thing…ahead of the curve …of course.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.acenet.edu/news-room/Pages/Myth-College-Sports-Are-a-Cash-Cow2.aspx[/url]”>http://www.acenet.edu/news-room/Pages/Myth-College-Sports-Are-a-Cash-Cow2.aspx</a></p>
<p>BIG-money sports is a net revenue loser at the majority of Div1 schools. For revenue, college sports is a winner-takes-all market.</p>
<p>If BIG-money sports is such a reliable revenue generator, then why do schools have to charge activity fees-- which is what this thead is about.</p>
<p>At schools where football and basketball lose money, they are not BIG-money sports.</p>
<p>Duke basketball?</p>
<p>Obviously, if it cannot make money, it is not a BIG-money sport (regardless of how good the team is).</p>