<p>That’s the problem with self-regulation. You’re placing the responsibility of punishing infractions on the person who suffers the most from the punishment (arguably, at least, UNC at least has other sports as well as the rest of the college to work with; if the NCAA starts taking a hatchet to its revenue scream in the name of moral purity they aren’t going to live long).</p>
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Yes, but the football players could get A’s for playing football, which wd help balance out the abysmally low grades in academic subjects-- just like a chemical engineering major’s A’s in chemical engineering wd help balance out a lousy grade in oil painting. </p>
<p>Here’s the curriculum of the dance department at WUSTL. (from a google search for dance majors)
<a href=“http://pad.artsci.wustl.edu/dance/courses”>http://pad.artsci.wustl.edu/dance/courses</a>
and the major requirements:
<a href=“http://pad.artsci.wustl.edu/dance/major”>http://pad.artsci.wustl.edu/dance/major</a></p>
<p>Somehow just playing football doesn’t seem like enough. Plus they would have to fulfill distribution requirements, no?</p>
<p>I think co oping like northeastern and others do with internships during the season would help. </p>
<p>For those calling for the death penalty, understand that the ONLY way they can impose the death penalty is if they invalidate those credit hours and since student outside of athletics at all and student athletes in every sport had a class, they would have to give the death penalty to all athletics at unc. All. They would have to revoke degrees, sometimes for people who had otherwise stellar academics, and they won’t do that. </p>
<p>@bclintonk. Please remember you sent me a message asking me not to disagree with you. Please refrain from quoting or addressing me in threads. This is the last time I will honor your request I not disagree with you on threads. You can’t have it both ways. Leave me out of your points. Thank you</p>
<p>Athletes can’t go to school part time and be eligible by NCAA rules. Many athletes take a light schedule during the season, but still need to be registered for 12 credits. You can’t just give out scholarships to be used later. Once the player goes pro, no more scholarship money.</p>
<p>At my school and in my day a billion years ago when most athletes still graduated from college, the easy major was Recreation. It was a BS rather than a BA (like Phys Ed was) so that meant no foreign language requirement, no nutrition, no hard sciences. My roommate was a Rec major. There was still a lot of cheating among the athletes, but those who wanted to do the work could actually get a degree, and I don’t think the professors were so involved in the cheating. She took classes like Coaching Softball, Coaching Tennis, but she learned how to run a Rec Center and actually did that for a job for a number of years. Our school actually had an old holdover requirement of 4 credits extra (so 124 credits needed instead of 120). These were supposed to be 4 physical activity classes, but that specific requirement was dropped. Anyone could take a course in swimming, bowling, ice skating for 1 credit. Most students did take a couple of these as they were fun. Many athletes took a bunch of them! But to be fair, one football player during my time majored in engineering and was a Rhodes Scholar too.</p>
<p>My brother majored in Sports Management, which is entirely different. His classes involved more business focus, how to market the team, how to schedule, contracts, etc. He runs a sports league, and is the best scheduler of a tournament there is, teams, fields, and refs. It is really hard and you have to know the teams and personnel involved.</p>
<p>I’m not surprised at the cheating, but am surprised that UNC was so open about it. And so stupid about it.</p>
<p>Fair enough, but I don’t see the purpose then of even having them take classes at all then. If they aren’t expected to learn anything and are just being awarded grades solely for the purpose of boosting their GPA, then why not just skip that step and remove the GPA requirement entirely? </p>
<p>The purpose of the GPA requirement is to ensure that student athletes are both students AND athletes. If the athletics portion counts for both parts, there is no reason to even call them ‘students’ at all. Just treat them like professional athletes and get over it.</p>
<p>(To use your example; It would be like letting the chemical engineering major use an A in oil painting to make up for their lousy grade in chemical engineering. It’s great that they are fantastic at oil painting but if they want to be a ‘chemical engineer who does oil paintings too’ then they have to be good at both. If they could substitute their oil painting classes for their chemical engineering classes and count them for both, they wouldn’t really be chemical engineering students - they would just be oil painters who were inexplicably granted a degree in engineering that they did nothing to earn.)</p>
<p>@twoinanddone. Many of us can’t believe unc commissioned the report and investigation. After so many previous investigations into the same thing. It’s endless. And stupid. No SEC or Big1G team would cooperate let alone commission something like this. </p>
<p>That said, I’m glad we did it, and we should not cooperate with any more. Let Espn go find someone else to feed to the scandal junkies now. Reporters who haven’t even read the report are interviewing everyone but the investigator. Only pbs has interviewed him. </p>
<p>Fwiw. He points out that universities are not set up to oversee these things. He thinks they ALL need to change and that this is hardly specific to unc. But that’s not nearly as great a media sound bite as the guy from Ohio who wants to eliminate all college athletics. Sigh. </p>
<p>Read the report. </p>
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</p>
<p><a href=“Why being a college athlete is a full-time job”>http://money.cnn.com/2014/03/31/news/companies/college-athletes-jobs/</a> suggests that a college football player spends 40-50 hours per week in-season, 12-20 hours per week in the off-season, and 20-25 hours per week in the summer.</p>
<p>Put it credit hour terms, that would be about 15 credit hours in the fall semester, about 5 credit hours in the spring semester, and about 4 credit hours in the summer session. So if a “sports major” allowed playing the sport as part of the course work, that would mean no other course work in the fall, 10 credit hours of other courses in the spring, and optionally 4 credit hours of other courses in the summer (assuming 15 credit hours in each of the fall and spring semesters and 8 credit hours in the summer). That would mean fitting all other major requirements and general education requirements in 40 to 56 credit hours, unless the student-athlete took an extra (“redshirt”?) year to take more courses other than practicing the sport.</p>
<p>Of course, other sports may have different amounts of time spent in-season and off-season.</p>
<p>Just because playing football well is difficult and time-consuming doesn’t make playing football an academic subject. What’s next, a major in Poker? Playing Video Games? Plumbing?</p>
<p>
I really see no difference in academic-ness between playing football & playing a lead in a musical.</p>
<p>A BFA in musical theatre requires scholarly study of musical theory, literary analysis of plays, history of theatre, etc. You do not get a degree by just playing the lead in a musical. In fact, in many programs you get very little if any academic credit for performances. It is considered like an internship, a small part of the academic requirements, but something you have to do. </p>
<p>That said, I agree that it would be fair to give some academic credit for playing on a varsity level athletic team. Maybe the equivalent to one class in the semester (for comparison purposes my DD received one half credit for having the lead in a musical - that required a similar level of time commitment in rehearsals). </p>
<p>I would be OK with some credit given like that. I just don’t think that there is anything materially different between allowing someone to cover all of their academic course requirements by playing a sport (or playing the lead in a musical, or doing oil paintings for that matter). If you do want to be a student/athlete as a concept, then you should have to keep both the student and the athletics portion.</p>
<p>To take it the other way, would it be fair to treat “being an English major” or “being a Chemistry major” as a varsity sport? If someone does not participate in sports at all, should they be allowed to count the classwork that they are already doing as a sport and apply for athletics scholarships and things like that based only on ‘sports activities’ such as writing papers, attending lectures, and taking exams?</p>
<p>If that sounds strange, then so to is the concept that a student athlete can cover all of their academic requirements just by practicing and playing sports. </p>
<p>Student athletes understand that they are required to both practice and be full time students. Many student athletes (including football players) complete their degree and become doctors, lawyers, and engineers. All student athletes are monitored by the NCAA to make sure they have a minimum GPA , take at least 12 hours, and are making satisfactory progress toward a degree. The NCAA is not involved in determining course content or degree requirements and they really shouldn’t be.</p>
<p>The organization responsible for insuring sham courses are not taught is the accreditation agency , in this case the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SAC). I think it is appropriate for SACs to place UNC on probation and threaten to pull their accreditation. This would be a huge deal and is the best way to insure this sort of thing does not happen again. </p>
<p>Yes. I agree. </p>
<p>Frankly, very few D1 athletes become lawyers, doctors, engineers or Supreme Court Justices (Byron White). Of course there are exceptions, most of which we do not hear about, so let’s not minimize the philosophical inconsistencies and downright fraud at colleges at the major athletics departments.</p>
<p>As for the accreditation agency, I predict that there’s no way they get involved in this mess. I foresee UNC’s fellow members coming to its defense, because if the accreditation agency sanctions a lofty school such as UNC, it may begin to look more closely at places like Auburn, which has had multiple shenanigans regarding player transcripts etc. Same thing at NC State U, where the late Coach Valvano lost his job over academic fraud. There are no more John Woodens around anymore.</p>
<p>Yes. Well even john wooden wasn’t really a John Wooden. Unfortunately. </p>
<p>Look, I’m unhappy with this report, though I am happy with how willingly UNC is dealing with it. I also think this woman did a massive disservice to African American Diaspora studies, which is the real name of the department and which is a valuable and important subject, as important as European history, frankly. </p>
<p>There needs to be more oversight. There needs to be more support and remediation work in place for underprepared students too. It’s pretty much true that our K-12 education is uneven to say the least, in this country. This should not doom a student. Figure out how to remediate for this, IMHO, and we will go a long way to achieving true equality of opportunity. Fwiw</p>
<p>A former D1 football player, and HYS educated lawyer, gave me this article to read a few years back:</p>
<p><a href=“The Scandal of NCAA College Sports - The Atlantic”>The Scandal of NCAA College Sports - The Atlantic;
<p>He seems to feel pretty strongly the system took serious advantage of the majority of his teammates.</p>
<p>Jeremy Lin, anyone?</p>
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<p>Some schools do offer that. For example, Berkeley lists PE 11 and PE 12 with description of “Variety of intercollegiate sports for men/women. Students should select section by activity and time preferences. Students should consult the each semester to determine the particular activities available” as 0.5 credit units each and “15 weeks - 2 hours of laboratory per week” (a huge underestimate of the time commitment of some sports). Of course, a student-athlete needs to find 11.5 credit units of other courses to make a minimum “full time” schedule, or 14.5 credit units of other courses to make a schedule that will lead to enough credit units for graduation in eight semesters.</p>
<p><a href=“Physical Education (PHYS ED) < University of California, Berkeley”>http://bulletin.berkeley.edu/courses/phys_ed/</a></p>
<p>Accrediting agencies place most of the burden on institutions themselves and basically trust that what a school reports is accurate. The fact the UNC actually assessed this problem and took corrective action will probably count as a plus in the eyes of accreditors.</p>