<p>Cutting women's rowing, men's swimming and diving, wrestling and indoor track and field....
due to budgets....</p>
<p>have a feeling it's only the tip of the iceberg......</p>
<p>The last line in the article states:</p>
<p>“In response to state budget cuts over the past two years, UC Davis also has eliminated courses, increased class sizes, reduced student services, increased fees and cut student enrollment.”</p>
<p>Most of the schools we looked at for DS were small privates.</p>
<p>It’s sad to see an amazing system (meaning the UCs) suffer. But I have faith that these are temporary hard times, that the UC will remain one of the premiere educational institutions in the world, and that women’s rowing – and much else – will return to Davis & other UC campuses in a matter of a few years. Hang in there, Calif residents.</p>
<p>My now-college-freshman D was concerned last year when she was looking at colleges about the UC budget crunch (it seemed like it was in the news every day last year as she was making her decision). She chose to go to a private out of state college–which has been in the news this year about all of its budget-cutting angst. You just can’t win sometimes!</p>
<p>Every college and university in America could drop women’s rowing and men’s wrestling and not have one iota of negative impact on the academic quality.</p>
<p>These are precisely the kinds of cuts that administrators should be making and should have been making all along.</p>
<p>ID,</p>
<p>I don’t think we want to get into which groups could be dropped to improve academic quality.</p>
<p>The problem with the cost of higher education in this country is that nobody has been making hard decisions about priorities. The current economic pressure is forcing those kinds of considerations. That’s not a bad thing.</p>
<p>Indoor track and field? In California?</p>
<p>This is a shame. I think UC Davis is a great place to go to college.</p>
<p>The application numbers from California were way up across the board at the eastern private colleges. I remember a year ago when the media was full of articles about how the public universities would be the big winners as private colleges would lose their applicant pool.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.ucop.edu/news/factsheets/2010/10apptable3.pdf[/url]”>http://www.ucop.edu/news/factsheets/2010/10apptable3.pdf</a></p>
<p>From those application numbers, it looks like UC-Davis should still be able to fill next year’s freshman class, even without women’s rowing!</p>
<p>If I’m not mistaken, isn’t the UC system trying to decrease its enrollment?</p>
<p>[UC</a> Davis to cut four sports to balance budget - ESPN](<a href=“LIVE Transfer Talk: Bayern, Juve, Liverpool track Phillips - ESPN”>UC Davis to cut four sports to balance budget - ESPN)</p>
<p>The article states that 2.9 million will be saved over 3 years and 153 student athletes are affected. UC Davis has an undergraduate population of 24,655. On the face of it, this strikes me as justified.</p>
<p>S2 is at UC Davis and active in both club and intramural sports. Go Aggies!</p>
<p>Yes the UCs are cutting enrollment. I think it is a ten percent cut. Some of the schools including Davis are using wait lists for the first time.</p>
<p>And UC Davis has an arboretum…:)</p>
<p>Avoidingwork…yeah go aggies. The special olympics had it’s summer games at UC Davis last year. Except for the heat…I really like the campus…and the small town.</p>
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<p>At least they’ve got their priorities straight. An arboretum is much more important than a wrestling team!</p>
<p>But if they ever cut the dachshund races, then we know that the budget cutting has gone too far!</p>
<p>The problem with cutting women’s crew is that I’m sure that some colleges used it to help them get right with the Title IX numbers.</p>
<p>Last year UCIrvine cut swimming and diving for both men and women. This was after they had offered a scholarship to one of our top boys swimmers and he had accepted. He ended up going there and not swimming. I thought it was a shame, but he took the time to concentrate on the transition and focus on school.</p>
<p>UCDavis has the longest waitlist of all the UC’s. UCDavis is the school that my D has her eye on, it’s a shame to see what is happening to our state schools and how they are now offering more OOS enrollment. Our state schools were already hard to get into and now they’ve made it harder. We’ve paid taxes all this time and we may end up OOS paying for school. I might have to write a state congressman/woman or two.</p>
<p>I find the wrestling comments interesting.</p>
<p>My stepson started wrestling in 9th grade. Wrestling far and away has been the dominant force sculpting his life.</p>
<p>He was a poor student and really going nowhere before wrestling. Initially, it made him concentrate on grades, not because of a sudden love of school, but because in order to be eligible to wrestle, he needed the grades. </p>
<p>In the end, it taught more than he’d have ever learned in 20 years of school. Wrestling is one of the purest sports. For 6 or 7 minutes in front of hundreds of people, everything is on you and your opponent. You are naked in front of the world. There are no timeouts, no teammates to pass to, no one to pick you up. There were times where he knew he would be able to win handily, and times when he stepped on the mat knowing his chances were darn near impossible he’d win, but he (and a lot of other wrestlers I watched over the years) always went out, gave it his all, and never gave up. I’d never even been to wrestling match prior to his joining the team. As I watched over the years, I realized wrestling taught him more and helped him grow into a man than anything else anyone or anything could have done. He was good in HS, and made it to our state chamionships, but didn’t place. He was eliminated in what would be his final HS match by getting pinned by a wrestler with a much better pedigree, but my S was winning at the time. He walked off that mat disappointed, heartbroken really, but with his head held high. He knew he gave it everything he had and that it was OK he didn’t win. But he had begun to believe in himself. As a college freshman in his 6th match, he went up against the defending NCAA champ (this was Division 3) and pulled an upset. It was amazing to watch him believe in himself and watch as the other kid realized that he was in a dogfight he would eventually lose. I was so proud, not because he won, but because he believed.</p>
<p>Anecdotally, I’d also say both his HS and college team were filled with some of the nicest, most respectful kids I ever met. And the backups and stars all felt the same way towards each other. </p>
<p>My son’s college coach was fired after his first year, and after 3 semesters he ultimately transferred to a school where he there was no wrestling team (another Title IX casualty). He never accomplished all he wanted in wrestling, but he accepted that realizing that his degree would eventually be the way to open the door to his next challenge.</p>
<p>My point isn’t that wrestling isn’t some magical sport. It is however a very viable sport, one that teaches a lot of life skills and lessons that you are hard pressed to get in any other sport. Is it more valuable than other sports or activities? I wouldn’t argue that, because I don’t know enough about the touchy-feely type ECs that a lot of kids have. I will say that while there always seems to be some who comment that athletes in general and wrestlers in particular are somehow intellectually inferior, there are a lot of pretty bright, articulate kids wrestling at Harvard, Cornell, Penn and a lot of other top schools. HS wrestling is the 6th most popular participation sport for boys with nearly double the participants of golf and tennis and over double the number of swimmers. Sadly at the collegiate level, it’s fallen so far off the map due to Title IX and the lack of a women’s counter sport. </p>
<p>Intersteddad, I was just curious how you managed to quantify the fact that an arboretum is much more important to any University than a wrestling team? I guess that’s your personal opinion. Personally, I’m sure I’m in the minority here on CC but I’d rather see a wrestling team than an arboretum. In my opinion there is more to be gained by forming productive members of the college community and beyond with the wrestling team than in the arboretum, which seems to function more like a park for the general public (open to the public for no charge 24/7/365) and an outdoor classroom than anything else. Book knowledge isn’t the be all - end all, there are things to be learned from sports. For my family, wrestling was responsible for shaping my son into the student he is today. If he hadn’t wrestled, I am certain he’d be struggling to find work in this economy as an unskilled worker.</p>
<p>Frankly, it’s unfortunate that the economy will likely result in a lot of sports and other EC activities being dropped that will probably never come back, regardless of the Title IX implications that have been so detrimental to men’s non-revenue sports over the past decades. That, however, is an entirely different dicussion…</p>
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<p>Ha! Dstark’s original comment to me about the arboretum and my reply about the importance of arboretums were both part of a long-standing joke between us and others here who debate college budgets and priorities. The “wrestling” part just stumbled into the joke. I would have said the same thing about arboretums being more important than “chemistry departments” if that had been the flow of the repartee.</p>
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<p>On wrestling, I have nothing against wrestling. It’s just a sport with very little interest at the collegiate level. In Division III, there are only 80 some teams left – all wedged into one corner of the country, north of Virginia and east of Iowa. Even the NESCAC doesn’t sanction wrestling as most of its athletics crazy schools don’t even field teams. I think that if a college is looking to balance a budget, then eliminating a sport that most of its peers got rid of years ago is a reasonable choice.</p>