<p>Caltech etc are niche or Lac. Apples to oranges. But uni to uni those with big sports programs have better academics…how about Stanford. FOR ONE!</p>
<p>Interesting link, Musicprint. thanks.</p>
<p>I can’t imagine a parent of a student-athlete who wouldn’t agree with that report. Of course, there’s nothing in that report that would in any way recommend cutting athletics, just making it easier for a student-athlete to be a student first. </p>
<p>But, yeah, I don’t think that means that “every single study” ever done shows there is no link between alumni donations and athletics. But, sure, you could try cutting the football programs from the SEC. Or the basketball programs in the ACC, or either one from the Big Ten. I really don’t think you’d make much progress.</p>
<p>And the reason you wouldn’t make any progress is because…wait for it…the alumni donors and taxpayers who have graduated from these schools would never stand for it.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Definitely Chicago has a similar model to CalTech. Your example of your son is exactly what a college should provide to every student, not just the atheletes.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>No, CalTech and UChicago will not meet the needs of many students. However, if students were given a choice: Lower fees and less athletics or higher fees and more athletics, I am sure many would prefer lower fees, especially if they have to borrow money to pay for sports teams.</p>
<p>I don’t think there’s a single right answer. It depends on the school. At the handful of schools where the athletic department is actually a profit center (like my undergrad alma mater, Michigan), cutting athletics isn’t even a serious question; it would be sheer idiocy. Athletic programs cost these schools nothing, they bring in millions of dollars worth of publicity and good will, they give the school a distinctive and identifiable brand, it’s a central rallying point for campus life and an opportunity for alums to connect with their alma mater, and much more.</p>
<p>It’s a tougher call at the far larger number of Div. I schools that aspire to financial self-sufficiency in athletics but fall short. At that level I think it’s just inevitable that more schools are going to follow UC Berkeley’s lead and start cutting non-revenue or low-revenue sports (which includes not just women’s sports but basically all men’s sports except football, basketball, and sometimes hockey), either to eliminate the athletic department deficit or at least to trim it to a manageable, sustainable level. Among these schools, the athletic deficit often measures in the millions, or sometimes tens of millions of dollars per year. Continuing to pour good money after bad in an increasingly quixotic quest for self-sufficiency is hard to justify when tuition is skyrocketing, academic programs are being slashed, faculty hiring is frozen, and faculty and staff face “furloughs” or permanent cuts in pay and benefits.</p>
<p>Most schools are in neither of these categories. Their athletic programs aren’t close to self-sustaining, never were and never will be. Their athletic expenses are generally lower because they don’t pay top dollar for big-name coaches and they don’t give athletic scholarships—the two biggest expenses for Div. I programs. But they also have negligible athletic revenue; basically all sports are non-revenue or low-revenue, they don;t get the billion-dollar TV contracts that the BCS-level football schools get, and so on. At this level intercollegiate athletics come closer to the well rounded student-athlete model; it’s an extracurricular, and like debate or theater or a choral group or any other extracurricular, there are expenses involved; the only difference is, athletics tend to e more expensive than most other extracurriculars. At this level, schools are going to make widely different choices. The schools with the strongest finances and traditionally strong sports programs will hold on to sports for a long time, because it’s central to their identity; it’s hard to imagine a Williams being Williams without sports, for example. Others may cut back, or scrap certain sports entirely, or demote more sports to “club”-level competition, because faced with budget constraints and the need to set priorities in an age of austerity, intercollegiate sports may not be as high on their agenda as some other things. And I guess bottom line I think that’s fine; there will be cutbacks but they’ll be uneven, and students will have choices as to the packages of programs and amenities, including athletic opportunities, available to them among the various colleges. So, let the market decide this one.</p>
<p>actually, uc davis cut several low-revenue sports teams earlier in the summer (to the dismay of the kids who were participants)…so in this case berkeley is following davis’s lead.</p>
<p>btw, did berkeley cut basketball? it’s been a minute since they’ve been considered good.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Are you saying that students at CalTech and UChicago pay less money than students who go to other schools? Are these particularly inexpensive schools? So, not having athletics has made these schools MORE affordable than the other schools?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I didn’t mean to suggest Berkeley was the first school to cut non-revenue or low-revenue sports. But Davis isn’t exactly on Berkeley’s level in the sports world. No way would Davis be in a position to dream of a financially self-sufficient athletic department. Cal did have those dreams. Their recent cuts were in effect an admission of the failure of those dreams. The announcement didn’t claim it would get them to athletic self-sufficiency. They said they hoped to trim the annual shortfall to a “sustainable” level of something like $4 million to $5 million a year</p>
<p>bclintonk, I think you summed it up well in #104. In the end it comes down to student choices between “packages” of school offerings. As several posters have mentioned, there needs to be more transparency on sports spending for students to make informed choices. How much tuition or fees goes to subsidize the athletic program should be a published metric, along with freshman retention and faculty-student ratio. I think most students at 4-year institutions want extra-curriculars supported, but the degree may vary.</p>
<p>From the Knight Commission report linked to in #98.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>It’s this last conclusion that we should all be concerned about. Sports spending is hardly the biggest problem facing U.S. higher education and the perception of its effectiveness (cost/benefit) in training high-quality graduates, but it’s something that’s easy to point to from the outside when talking about unnecessary extras.</p>
<p>Let’s not put U of C or CIT on such a pedestal. They are no more “models” than the vast majority of DIII institutions. U of C offers 17 varsity sports including football, with a robust roster of over 70. It also has 30+ active club sports.</p>
<p>CIT also has 17 varsity sports and lots of club teams, but no football.</p>
<p>As I was watching the volleyball game this afternoon, I was thinking about this thread. I have not read any of the 7 pages. So forgiving me if this point has been discussed.</p>
<p>I think some of the sport program should be cut if the school budget is low. One of the teams in today’s tournament is so bad, the only point they are getting is when the other teams bench players made mistakes. There is no girl taller than 5 ft 8 and none of them could really jump. Why do you want to keep a team like that?</p>
<p>^^ Just because they aren’t winning and don’t have all 6.5’ girls on the team isn’t a reason to not have a team. The main point of the team is to give the players a chance to play and gain whatever other benefits sports players gain by playing sports. If one used the philosopy that only the winning teams should be permitted to have teams and players there’d only be a small handlful of teams in the country.</p>
<p>^^ you could get a bunch of students together and just play. We did that when we were in college. We play within and across different departments. You don’t have to spend money you don’t have to support a team that is sooooo bad. </p>
<p>I bet our HS team could easily take this college team. Other than the serves, they could barely get the ball over the net. Yet they have uniforms, school buses, paid coaches, etc.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>It’s no different than fine arts.</p>
<p>I play a supporting role as an athletic training major and have worked with a variety of sports here. My roommate my freshman and sophomore years was a technical theatre major. He played a supporting role in many of the fine arts performances.</p>
<p>i agree with ucla_dad. Organized sports, and real teams with real coaches, who may not be very good, yet, deserve a chance to play. using the logic that a team that loses should not be funded would mean that UC Berkeley should shut down its football program today! The coaches salaries alone would save millions of dollars this year.</p>
<p>Organized sports for young people (junior level and college) is one of the best things our society does</p>
<p>Don’t cut a team just because they aren’t winning and don’t have a chance of winning. I went to one of those brainiac schools and played ice hockey (D3 level). </p>
<p>My first season we weren’t very good (gross understatement). Several kids couldn’t take the loosing, but they quickly quit. The rest of us had fun at practice, on the bus and even the games. It was a way to let of steam from the classroom pressures and most of us realy needed that.</p>
<p>The next season we got a couple of good players and started winning more than we lost. Playing in college improved my game tremendously and I even got good enough to make a semi-pro team for a couple of seasons. Now, 30+ years later, I still play hockey twice a week and am very gratefull for the experience I had in college.</p>
<p>I agree with ucla_dad and pacheight. Losing or lacking talent is not a good reason for cutting funding for a team. I’m a sometime critic of college sports but not because some teams are lousy. Whether the teams are good or bad, I think sports deserves a place at colleges. I just object to schools getting their priorities wrong and valuing sports ABOVE academics.</p>
<p>Signs that a school’s priorities are out of whack:
- When the average admission academic stats for athletes is well below the average for the whole school.
- When the athletes winning a big championship or award is a celebrated and valued more than one of the school’s top scholars winning a big academic honor such as a Rhodes or Marshall scholarship.
- When the football or basketball coach is the highest paid employee of the school.
- When the graduation rate for athletes is well below that of the rest of the student boy.
- When the new football stadium gets built but a new chem lab or adding an annex to the library can’t get funded.
- And so on…</p>
<p>But having a losing or untalented team? No, that’s not much of a red flag.</p>
<p>Sports teams and athletes can provide a campus laboratory for students to learn skills specific to their majors, such as business, marketing, physical therapy, medicine, kinesiology, etc. For example, my daughter’s school has a human performance lab where athletes rehab and undergo various medical tests. Pre-med students work there. When D was job-hunting, she saw a posting for a campus position which involved designing a new sports marketing program. I’m not saying that this justifies massive sports spending, but I kind of see as collegiate athletics as part of a complex ecosystem. Remove it, and you will see unexpected consequences.</p>
<p>TheGFG, that’s very much the case. My degree centers around there being an athletic department. As a part of one of my classes I spend 20+ hours per week with a sports team.</p>
<p>Totally agree with coureur. University monies should be spent only if the team is a “top tier” team? Preposterous.</p>
<p>That said, I did think Rice should have gone from a Div I to Div III school. They are bleeding sports money. But despite the McKinsey study saying that, the alums voted to keep it a Div I.</p>
<p>" Caltech etc are niche or Lac. Apples to oranges. But uni to uni those with big sports programs have better academics…how about Stanford. FOR ONE!"</p>
<p>Classic example of using an exception to prove the rule. Stanford is a top, competitive school, but it is an exception, it is one of the few top ranked schools in the top of any ranking. Take a look at the top schools, and the big football schools are not near the top, it is universities that other then Stanford. If you look at competitive admissions, the big sports programs schools in general are not up there in most rankings (and I am talking undergrad here, leaving grade schools out of it). Wanna try to argue that Alabam or Old Miss has the academic ranking of an ivy league school, or heavy hitter schools like MIT or Cal Tech? Want to argue that University of Chicago lags behind auburn or Florida St Academically? By any rankings that is a bogus statement. It doesn’t mean that schools with big sports programs aren’t good schools, places like U of Michigan or Georgia Tech are pretty well respected, but the reason they have good academics has little or nothing to do with their sports programs, a lot of it has to do with being state schools that can attract the best and brightest from their states, who are looking for a good education at a price they can afford. </p>
<p>What the Knight report and others are saying is exactly the opposite of the above, that they can find little or no evidence that big time sports programs do anything to improve the academic side, including alumni donations to the school. The WSJ blog entry points out that when alumni give to schools because of the athletic programs, they give to the athletic programs, for stadiums and gyms and whatnot. Likewise, the report also states that few programs break even or make a profit, so how could sports enhance the academics? I also sent an e-mail to a friend of mine who is an administrator at a well known private university on the financial side, and he mentioned that you have to be careful when you see things like “sports program donates X millions to the general scholarship fund”. What he told me was that that often was more a PR move, because often a)that money mysteriously seems to end up going to athletes in other sports programs ad part of their aid package or b)pretty much the same amount as went into the scholarship fund gets transferred from endowment income and the like to the sports program…but let’s assume that is not the rule,the fact is most sports programs, including big time division one programs, don’t break even and can cost the school money, so arguing they give money to the general program would be extremely limited, if even true.</p>
<p>BTW, I am not arguing cutting sports programs, quite honestly I would rather see a kid with a penchant for lacrosse or hockey or sailing get a chance to play that sport as an athete, and I would like to see real student-athletes participating in sports and having it help them attend college. I also think that the big time athletics programs where they are paying coaches millions of dollars and spend that much recruiting athletes to win national championships and such, whose costs are escalating way out in front of what they bring in, are anethma to what a college is supposed to be. The people on those programs are not scholars,many of them if they had to apply as a regular student would get laughed out of the admissions office, if they even get a degree for 90% of them it is a joke, and the fact is what they are is the minor league program for the NFL or NBA. If universities want these kind of programs to be associated with the school in a money making way, then work out a deal with the NBA or NFL to become in effect the farm system, and use the revenue from these programs to really help fund the primary business of a university, to teach and do research and also not coincidentally maybe fund real student athletes, who are using the scholarship in part to be able to afford an education, which is not true of most of the people playing division 1 football or basketball in the big programs. And if the people of a state need a football program to justify spending on higher education that can only benefit their state and the country and its people, ya gotta kind of wonder what the heck they have state schools for in the first place.</p>