<p>My new idea...</p>
<p>Instead of charging a flat fee for all, instead have a base fee, and then a surcharge if you will be playing a sport. Why should the kids who never benefit from the sports teams have to pay for them? </p>
<p>At schools such as Boston College or Notre Dame, so much $ is going to a football team, that $ could go towards merit scholarships, tuition reduction, etc.</p>
<p>How come no school has tried this?</p>
<p>Furthermore, if the school makes $ of the team, they can reimburse the student.</p>
<p>They need to pay the college athlete, not charge him more. Getting rid of ridiculous Title IX restrictions would also lessen the college funding blow.</p>
<p>Why would they pay a college athlete if the sport brings no revenue to the school?</p>
<p>I.E. Crew - all crew brings is prestige, and cost.</p>
<p>Prestige attracts applications (Harvard), which attracts application fees. And gives rise to countless sweater-sales.</p>
<p>At our local public schools, my kids do not use the very expensive Special Education teachers - so why not reduce my share of the school tax to reflect that? Also the buses - I drive my kids to school, or they drive themselves - why should I have to pay for buses? Man, if I had line-item veto, I can think of about a hundred things I could refuse to pay for at my school. In fact, why pay for school at all once my kids graduate?</p>
<p>And hey - what about my 5-figure federal taxes? I never use Medicaid, Disaster Relief, the national free kidney dialysis program or about one million other things - why should I pay for them?</p>
<p>And I am not just talking about necessities like education and medical things. What about rich people in gated communities with their own coutry clubs -why should they have to pay for national parks that they don't use? Why give any many to the National Endowment for the Arts? Why should my tax dollars go for landscaping the school - only those people who want to look at pretty trees should pay.</p>
<p>I want my taxes reduced - I own a swimming pool and tennis court, and never use the municipal ones, so why should I have to pay for them? Let the poor people pay for them! And the playground parks too!</p>
<p>Why not just privatize EVERYTHING and have a Blade-Runner future - a two-tier society where the "haves" pay ONLY for what they personally use and the "have-nots" get shafted?</p>
<p>Why do my tax dollars go to support all kinds of non-necessities that I never use anyway, such as subsidies for various corporations and their products?</p>
<p>And college tuition? Fuhgeddaboudit! Why should I pay for a huge expensive theater or music department when my kid isn't into the arts? Why does the budget include extracurricular things like chorale group trips to Europe? And that Writing Lab!!! My kids don't need remedial help -why should I pay for someone else's kids to get it? </p>
<p>OK, you got it now? <strong><em>For the one or two people with thick heads, the above was sarcastic!</em></strong>*</p>
<p>Sorry, I believe in the Greek ideal of a sound mind in a sound body, and that doesn't just mean a work-out room available for students. Sports teams are a part of a whole college community, as are music and the arts,
nature, museums, exhibits, pre-orientation trips, outing clubs, and many, many other things besides academics. </p>
<p>Finally, whether we like it or not, a huge amount of money is given to schools by their alumni and much of that is based on sports. Your idea that the exact same amount of money would be available for tuition reduction if sports were eliminated is naive.</p>
<p>And please - spare me the "you are carrying my argument to a ridiculous extreme" defense. Once you start down that slippery slope of claiming that you are not really part of one community, whether it is your college, your town, or your country, and you will only pay for what benefits you personally, you have opened up a can of worms that will - to mix a metaphor - eventually come back and bite you in the face. You may believe that sports are somehow "different," yet people can argue that things YOU believe are a necessity are also indefensible.</p>
<p>At my Local U income generated by the football team covers the cost of all the other sports, making the entire sports program self supporting.</p>
<p>Ilcaopo,</p>
<p>You would be suprised at how much money generated from sports teams (especially football & Basketball) which comes from Alumni supports other things in the college. What is that saying: one hand washes the other an both hands wash the face.</p>
<p>There are all kinds of schools that never would have risen above regional (or religious) prominence if it wasn't for athletics. When I went to college in the late 60s, I never met a top-ranking student (now mind you, I was in the north) who would have considered Duke, even as a safety, or a non-Catholic student who would consider Georgetown. (This is not a knock on these schools, which are said to be excellent, only a reality check on how they came to be well-known.)</p>
<p>And I see no reason why colleges shouldn't be equally devoted to educating athletes as they are to nerds (I being the father of one of each - my complaint would rather be that toften they don't educate the athletes, even when they accept them, and exploit them instead). In hindsight, most folks can't even remember the names of courses they took in college, let alone the content covered, but they can remember the shows they were in, the recitals in which they performed, the football games they played in, the gymnastics meets at which they met their future husbands.</p>
<p>If college were simply about academics, most of it could be done over the Internet, with books written by the world's finest faculty, rather than having to spend four years living in New Haven or, worse, Princeton, New Jersey!</p>
<p>Voronwe: Loved your post!!!! Now let's all go out and vote DEMOCRATIC as it is what America is all about. Also, since we don't ever USE the special education teachers, why can't we have some gifted/talented teachers as well???? Why can't the g/t kids get a piece of the pie? Why does the general public believe that just because you are g/t you don't need special programming? You will be successful in spite of this, has always been their excuse. We certainly don't want to consider you a member of the elite. Now I suppose I just opened up another can of worms. Probably does not belong on this post.</p>
<p>It's ok, sgiovinc1 - I happen to be a very strong supporter of gifted programs!</p>
<p>But this isn't public education I'm talking about - I'm specifically talking about private universities. </p>
<p>While I understand the idea behind the Duke/Georgetown thing, don't you think that this speaks to the fact that the schools are overrated? If a school's claim to fame is its sports and not its academics, then the top athletes should be going there and not the top students.</p>
<p>You guys make incredible arguments! I've been slayed :(</p>
<p>No. It may simply speak to the fact that the schools were relatively undiscovered.</p>
<p>Look - they are schools in the midwest - Hope, Kalamazoo, Grinnell, Earlham, St. Olaf's - that, corrected for selectivity and SAT scores, have much higher rates of admissions to graduate schools (if you like that as a measure) than any of the Ivy League schools. In other words, the "value-added" of what happens to a student once s/he is there is much higher than for any of the Ivies (actually, higher than virtually anywhere else.) But they are relatively "undiscovered". And they are not likely to be "discovered" through their academics (even though the value-added of their academics is greater than for HYP - in other words, from a purely academic perspective, they are better schools.) Who is to say the same isn't true at schools that happen to be discovered because of their athletics?</p>
<p>And why shouldn't athletes be getting "top educations"? - most of the students at Ivies, etc. don't need the educations they are getting to do well in the world anyway, which is certainly not true of many athletes.</p>
<p>Ilcapo, you can find schools where there is not the emphasis and funding for athletics, the arts, etc. There are so many schools out there that you can certainly find one that fits such a profile you like. Some are outstanding schools such as Swarthmore, a school without football and little emphasis on sports. The thing is that kids and parents do like athletics in a school for the most part. Having a great sports team can figure in a decision to apply, visit and go to a school. It also affect school spirit and brings in a certain type of student who would not want to go to a school without this spirit. So it can be a drawing card for the college. Many top students like going to a school with great sports programs. When more people feel like you do and let the colleges know by a drop in apps, they may think about getting rid of a team.</p>
<p>Voronwe, I LOVED your post. </p>
<p>Sgio...I also am very into the point you made about funds for Gifted/Talented. I live in a state where there is NO policy for gifted/talented nor programs that I know of. </p>
<p>Susan</p>
<p>Voronwe: Don't know if it was your intent, but your masterful and eloquent post reminds me why I am proud to be a Democrat.</p>
<p>ilcapo235 , I wasn't trying to "slay" you!! I was just soapboxing (is there such a word?) against a larger societal issue and you just happened to set me off! :-)</p>
<p>Voronwe - well it was a wonderful argument, very nicely done my friend!</p>
<p>Do you watch The Apprentice? Apparently one of the contestants was a debate champion at Harvard, which everyone finds remarkable...I suggest you challenge him.</p>
<p>So Swarthmore doesn't have a football team. Neither does University of Chicago. But I don't see either of them discounting their tuition because of it. Each of these schools made a decision to drop football, probably for philisophical as well as financial reasons. But it really doesn't affect the bottom line all that much.</p>
<p>Actually U of Chicago does have a football team. Swarthmore did have a football team, but they dropped the program. No, it did not affect the bottom line there, nor did it negatively affect admission statistics(probably brought up some academic stats LOL). But many Swatties do feel it has adversely or positively affected the type of students going to Swarthmore. It has become more of an artsy type school, I believe. But there is room for more of those. Emory is another school without a football team and it does not adversely affect that school. Oberlin, believe it or not, has a football team.</p>