Why should schools only provide a basic education? There are a great many reasons to participate in after school sports: general health and fitness, teamwork, confidence, community.
Schools can't do this too?
Schools can't do this too?
They don't require stadiums with amenities that would make royalty blush, nor seven-figure salaries paid to coaches.
There is some argument that colleges shouldn’t be a feeder for the NBA or NFL. Couldn’t we say the same about Google or any other tech company? Why should the universities be feeders for talent for private business? It’s ridiculous when you consider it that way. Why should Google benefit from a San Jose State University computer science graduate if the 49ers shouldn’t benefit from a UCLA student athlete?
Professional sports is a significant part of the US economy. [1] We could argue that programs such as gender studies, anthropology, or Classics are both heavily subsidized and pretty useless from an economic standpoint. Yet, we pay five-figure salaries to professors and six figure salaries to administrators affiliated with those fields.
I am not arguing against the value of those fields per se, only pointing out that sports are a very significant part of society and the economy, like it or not. From the benefit of the university standpoint, sports have a tremendous impact. Not many people are proud of and donate to the University of Texas because of a world-renowned ancient literature program — but because of football.
I don’t particularly like college football — I prefer baseball, however it is an exciting part of the year, especially if you are a student or alum. We waste billions of government money on ridiculous projects all the time. I think the price tag on California’s high speed train to Bakersfield is in the multi-billions? There is government funding to study the sex habits of tsetse flies? $38 million in federal money was wasted on a Ted Kennedy institute? We subsidize NPR and the National Endowment of the Arts. To be clear, I am not arguing against the National Endowment generally, only suggesting that most people don’t care about the next Mapplethorpe as they care about the next Tom Brady. Giving $5 of government money to subsidize an exhibition of Andres Serrano whose art featured a crucifix submerged in his own urine or $5 to a high school or college athletic program? Or $5 to a gender studies program? What choice would most people make? Personally, I would vote to just keep my $5 and let the people that wanted those programs to pay for it out of their own pocket.
So why are we complaining about college sports again — something tens of millions of people care about. NPR has about 30 million listeners. College football has an audience of over 160 million people. [2] The LSU-Texas game last weekend had over 5 million viewers. That’s about 6 times as many viewers as CNN gets during prime time.
[1] https://www.thestar.com/sports/football/2011/09/09/how_the_n... [2] https://footballfoundation.org/news/2019/6/11/2018-19_Attend...
I've been saying precisely this. The public is footing the bill for training employees for corporations.
To that I say:
1) Plenty of poor kids do find ways to participate in school sports. Let's not throw that baby out with the bathwater.
2) Where this is not possible, it would be better to find ways to make it possible than to get rid of something good for everyone.
If you want to have public sports programs, that's fine. It has nothing to do with school, should be an entirely separate pool of money, and IMO, should be entirely self-funded.
In the real world, though, athletics keep at-risk kids in school and trying to get grades because they want to play and need to make satisfactory progress in order to do so. Athletics have helped a ton of kids grow into prosperous adults because it kept them invested in their educations until they realized that it's what they needed to do anyway.