Should athletics be cut at some schools to cut costs?

Parents Forum
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<p>and it’s a good rationale! </p>

<p>it’s true that leadership skills can be found in other activities such ac college mock trial competitions, they’re amazing! But the level and numbers of students that gain leadership training through competitive sports (not club) is very, very significant. </p>

<p>I suspect the people bemoaning the cost of athletes represent the public schools and their lack of ability to manage public funds. The fact that Cal (all the uc’s aka the state of california) is broke is not because of sports it’s because of a terribly wasteful and mismanaged publicly funded system…and in California’s case it represents billions of dollars wasted. So cutting their sports teams is just another example of their mismanagement, because what they are cutting is leadership training.</p>

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<p>Umm… okay? </p>

<p><a href=“Note:%20FBS%20=%20Division%201%20football”>quote</a>

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Wrong. FBS= Football Bowl SUBdivision of Division 1 football. Division 1 football is split in two. FBS and FCS which is Football Championship Series.</p>

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<p>Quote from the link in post #9:</p>

<p>“Students were charged more than $795 million to support sports programs at 222 Division I public schools during the 2008-09 school year, according to an analysis of thousands of pages of financial documents. Adjusting for inflation, that’s an 18% jump since 2005, making athletics funding at public schools a key force in the rapidly escalating cost of higher education.”</p>

<p>Personally, I think that college sports are kind of fun and worthwhile if kept in proper perspective. But that perspective has long since been lost in many big time Div. 1 conferences. The sports arms race, and the attendant expense burden it imposes on the real students at the schools, has got to be dialed back. Schools need to decide what their real mission is - to be real institutions focused on higher learning or purveyors of sports entertainment and minor league farm clubs for the pro leagues.</p>

<p>And the notion that college sports are somehow needed to teach leadership or produce leaders is nonsense. There are tons of political, business, military, and cultural leaders in the US who never stepped foot on a sports field. Moreover, big time college sports is almost exclusively a US phenomenon. At thousands of colleges in other countries sports exist at most at the minor club level or often not at all. And these countries have no trouble producing plenty of leaders of all types.</p>

<p>Personally, I like the Ivy League model for college sports - which is sort of a middle ground. The schools take sports seriously, but academics always comes first. No athletic scholarships are given and “student-athletes” have to be real students with real academic qualifications, not just the pathetic NCAA minimum.</p>

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<p>Samurai,</p>

<p>The coaches at your D’s prospective colleges likely won’t know that far in advance if their sport is potentially on the chopping block. </p>

<p>When my D was a sophomore, a school in her conference told the kids in that sport near the end of the season that the sport was out at the end of the season. D’s team had a heavy heart the next week when they travelled to play there, knowing it would be the last pair of games for the other team.</p>

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<p>I am wondering why do some here think college sports train leaders exactly? I mean there are team leaders–the captains usually, and the experience may enhance their leadership skills, but why does it help the other team members in that area? I can see how sports contribute to building social skills and learning to work cooperatively as a team player, but to the same degree as many other kinds of group activities can (orchestra, volunteer projects, academic teams, etc.). But what is the connection between sports and leadership?</p>

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<p>None, really. But it’s one of the myths that coaches put out to justify their existence and salaries after a bad losing season - they didn’t win a game but at least they were teaching the boys leadership.</p>

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<p>If you don’t do your job, NOBODY will. I’ll use football as an example. There are 11 guys on the field per team. Each players must do HIS job. There is no “fall-back” really to still be successful.</p>

<p>This isn’t the case with group projects. Oftentimes, those projects are done by one or two people with one or two essentially going along for the ride.</p>

<p>“Upon the fields of friendly strife are sown the seeds, that upon other fields, on other days, will bear the fruits of victory.” General Douglas MacArthur</p>

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<p>When we went for pre-frosh weekend, I bought my wife a t-shirt that says
“Beaver Football, Undefeated Since 1993”</p>

<p>For those who do not get the joke, Beaver is the team nickname for CalTech. CalTech got rid of its football team in 1993 (hence undefeated since then). Their basketball team was featured in Sports Illustrated for going over 28 years with out winning a conference game. Yet they are have fairly big endowment and a very academically strong student body.</p>

<p>Many justify college sports even though they loose money on the grounds that it increases donations and increases number of student applicants. This sounds nice but most studies discount this. For example, applicants may increase but most of them are marginal i.e. they are not the top students the school would like to encourage to apply. How many ivy league candidates will apply to Boise state because of their football team?</p>

<p>Also college sports is big business outside colleges. Think of NCAA pools. Think of the airlines, the hotel companies etc. who profit from bowl games. These business also have an interest in college sports and they could not care less if money was being taken from academics and diverted to athletics. Hence there will be strong resistance to removing college sports, especially Football and Basketball. </p>

<p>I would hope CalTech is the new model where colleges treat sports as an extension of intra-mural activities and emphasize education, but I think it will take a long time to change the mindset and CalTech and a few others will be exceptions.</p>

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Regardless of the reason for the fiscal issues (and the UCs aren’t unique in having financial woes at the moment), the budget needs to get in order by reducing costs and/or increasing revenues. If cuts are to be made I can’t think of any reason why sports should be left alone and untouched while other programs are being cut. ‘Leadership training’ can happen in many ways and isn’t at all unique to the high cost sports which benefits very very few in this regard anyway (only the few players who actually play and even the leadership training benefits of that are debatable). One could perhaps argue that the high cost sports with the expensive and expansive coaching staff develops leadership skills in the players to a lesser extent than the lower cost sports since it’s the coaching staff who does more of the ‘leading’. An individual on a team, ex: a particular football position, doing their job isn’t an example of ‘leadership’ anyway. </p>

<p>Attaining leadership skills can happen in the non high cost sports, leading a theatre production, leading a team developing a robotic car, leading an effort to conduct some research, and in many many other ways.</p>

<p>None of the above disparages sports or the players. It’s not an ‘all or none’ - it’s a matter of striking a budgetary balance in light of the real economic condition of the particular college and where that college chooses to focus its resources. It makes sense for those students seeking a particular sports program to choose the college appropriately just as one who decides to be a computer science major or movie producer might choose a particular college with an appropriate focus in those areas.</p>

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<p>Why is it that when budgets need to be cut, people run first to athletics?</p>

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<p>Yes. Participation in them is so exclusive that to put so much into those programs while cutting others is unfair.</p>

<p>To the folks who think that athletics are first to be cut, tell that to the Arts departments.</p>

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<p>Our Art Department just opened a multi-million dollar campus. Not building; CAMPUS. Meanwhile we have only one building that is athletics-only…</p>

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<p>Because it’s easily in the visible eye. Because there are people that consider sweating nasty. Because some people have bad memories of high school gym class. Because some people have never been involved in athletics or had kids involved in athletics. Because some people like the educational model without athletics and think they should neer be intertwined. Because there is decreased emphasis in the K-12 system for phys ed so people aren’t as tuned into “healthy mind healthy body” thinking. And a million other reasons, everyone who turns to cutting athletics as the answer has a reason…as does everyone who supports athletics as part of an educational model.</p>

<p>I must say, to lump “athletics” into one big pile is generalizing. There’s miles of difference between the thousands of colleges and those colleges indivdiual programs as well as miles of difference between Division I NCAA sports and say the fencing program at a small LAC.</p>

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<p>interesting, I think denise post suggests what most here are thinking.</p>

<p>that it’s unfair to put so many resources towards supporting the few who demonstrate high athletic performance. And that a better approach is to more evenly fund everyone on campus. to me that’s a recipe for mediocrity.</p>

<p>And when was life ever suppose to be fair, it’s a competitive universe, with winners and losers, accept it</p>

<p>And cour, ya right, the non athlete, non actor, non public speaker, non student leaders coming out of our universities are just as likely to be leaders, ya right</p>

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<p>I really only mean to bookmark this, but my son has played sports as long as he has gone to school. It organizes him, motivates him, facilitates him socializing with a good group of peers. I really worry what this major change in his life would be like, with that change going on at the same time. Many kids are better students than he, but for him, sports educated him about commitment, leadership, and responsibility.</p>

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<p>Non-self funding athletic program be considered for budget reductions on the same level as academics, facilities, etc. Furthermore, if athletic programs happen to be fortunate enough to be self-funded and operating in the black, those programs should share the wealth with the non-athletic components of the university, particularly in these lean times. I do wonder to what extent that actually occurs.</p>

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<p>At the schools were certain programs make money, the funds are distributed in order to fund the other programs which do not make money. So, the men’s football programs at an SEC school will fund the title 9 women’s soccer and other programs, as well. The ACC basketball program will be used to fund the women’s title 9 basketball program.</p>

<p>But, yeah, if the students and the alumni would like to cut sports at the publicly funded SEC and ACC and Big Ten schools, then they should do it. I would hypothesize, however, that at these particular state schools, there would be a massive amount of alumni and students who would not want this, at all. If you are arguing that taxpayer money should not be spent on sports, you might want to consider the fact that many tax dollars are used to fund flagship universities and many taxpayers have no access at all to those schools.</p>

<p>It’s a slippery argument when these elitist type of discussions begin. There is an assumption that the majority of the residents of a state would be happy to pay for a school they have no connection to and to which thier children are denied access.</p>

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<p>Yorkyfan’s link in post #9 leads to an excellent article about hidden athletic fees imposed at many schools and differing point of view on such.</p>

<p>Some seem to think that athletics should be cut when needed along the same lines as academic programs. Shouldn’t academics be the highest priority of any college and be the last to be sheared?</p>

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<p>If a school needs to cut costs, then athletics should be put on the list like any other costs and evaluated, and if sacrifices need to be made, it is a priority. If cutting sports programs means being able to keep academic programs going or scholarships for deserving kids, maybe then it should be cut (or not if something else, like the head of the school having a private plane or something, can be cut:).</p>

<p>As far as athletics being the first to go, it isn’t, at least not at the secondary school level. A local school district due to budget cuts just creamed their art and music program (what little they had), and yet voted to spend 500,000 dollars redoing the football stadium, and the middle school eliminated a gifted and talented program (parents at the board meeting argued that it was a program for ‘elites’ and a waste of money, meanwhile self same parents made sure athletics wasn’t cut, which of course is elitist, in most schools very few kids are allowed to play on the sports teams, it is the definition of elite).</p>

<p>In terms of college sports, I think people need to be careful, because depending on the sport and the program it is not all the same, not by a longshot. Ivy league schools, for example, and any non division 1 ncaa program, don’t offer athletic scholarships, and kids are admitted to those schools based on their academic and test scores, like other students, and this is true across the board. Likewise, ‘lesser’ sports (and I apologize for using that word, I am not demeaning them) like lacrosse, and to a certain extent soccer and baseball, and sailing and so forth, even at big sports schools, tend to be students who play the sport for the love of it, there are no scholarships and such, it is simply for the love of the game.Where I went to school, all athletics were like that, at a school like Ohio State that would cover most sports other then the biggies…</p>

<p>Division 1 college sports, specifically basketball and football, is a very different animal. Most of the students playing on those teams are recruited to play there, and the prime focus is not ‘scholar-athletes’,which is true let’s say at Columbia or Harvard, but rather athletes playing for the college program. These programs are huge, and their focus is sports, period. In reality, what these are is the minor leagues for professional sports, the focus is on athetics and if the athlete actually gets an education and a degree, that is great, but that isn’t the focus. And these programs are cash cows, because these days television contracts are being done with the schools or conferences, and that is quite lucrative.Also, this kind of program does not generate much donation money from every study I have seen towards the general university, despite claims; when donors give money to schools because of athletics, it generally goes into athletic facilities and the like, as does pretty much 100% of the revenue from tv rights, merchandising and ticket sales. Basically, college football and basketball on that level are a business that has a school’s name on it, and the way to think of it is a business operated to feed the pro teams on the end of the 4 years. Am I against big time college sports? No., I watch it, can enjoy it, but I also am realistic that that has little to do with ‘pure’ college sports or the university and its budget. Frankly, I think this kind of sports program is outside the scope of this, since in a sense they are self financing, the money they get from tv revenue and ticket sales and merchandising probably pays the cost of the program and even has excess. My only take it they should drop the pretense that these are scholar athletes; the kid going to harvard or yale playing football is, guaranteed; the kid going to Ohio State or Oklahoma and playing football is an athlete who in some cases may also be a scholar actually getting a degree, but I personally think that should be optional. When big college programs can graduate people that are functionally illiterate after 4 years in the program, that tells the story.
I also question how character building division 1 sports programs like this are, considering the sordid track record of many of them…and in many schools, like rutgers, ‘pure sports’ like lacrosse and the like have been cutback, to pay, for example, the salary of the coach of the rutgers football program and building a new stadium, and similar happens with division 1 sports and ‘lesser sports’. </p>

<p>But with ‘regular’ college athletics outside the division 1 stuff above, I think those programs should be treated the same, and if there is a choice between athletics and academic needs, it should be lesser priority, since the focus of a school is education, not athletics, and education has to come first…but I think also that athletics has value, for a number of reasons, and that it needs to be treated fairly, too as do arts programs and so forth.</p>

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<p>gloworm,</p>

<p>That’s terrible. I am so sorry for those girls to experience this. :(</p>

<p>It’s true - there is no way of knowing which programs will be cut. That’s probably why D will focus on those schools that have won NCAA Championships or are in the top 10 in the country.</p>

<p>Still, it’s no guarantee.</p>

<p>Edited to add that: my D knows that at the schools she is looking for that there won’t be athletic scholarships that will help her get to the school of her dreams. It will likely be merit money, and hopefully, a whole lot of financial aid. </p>

<p>There are more academic scholarships out there than athletic scholarships.</p>