Comment by yupper32 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yupper32 | Hacker News Reader

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This would end up killing a bunch of smaller sports, and hurting the larger ones.

NCAA covers a massive number of sports. The vast majority of those who go pro in any US sport, first go through an NCAA team.

Think about a scenario in the current world: You're a pretty good golf player in high school. You commit to Stanford for golf and a degree in some STEM field. The school already has a system in place to make sure both are possible. You give high level competitive college golf a shot and realize you can actually go pro. After college, you do. And even if it doesn't work out, you've got a degree from Stanford.

And then there's your world: You're a pretty good golf player in high school. You go to college instead of the separate LPGA feeder leagues because it's the safer bet and your school doesn't have a system in place to make sure you can compete in both. Why would they? You never get to experience and thrive in the high level competitions and end up not going pro.

So many professional sports would get maimed with your model. After a decade the US would heavily drop on the world stage when it comes to sports.

Sounds like that's a problem for the pro sports leagues to solve. They have the money to do it, so they'll be fine.

Baseball does an adequate job with its system of minor league teams. Pretty much every other country in the world manages to have professional sports leagues without having universities be their feeder teams.

Even in your scenario, there's nothing stopping the aspiring golfer from attending Stanford part-time while they try to make it in pro-golf. Or applying and deferring admission for a couple of years. Frankly, they'd do better academically if they didn't have golf distracting them.

baseball arguably does a terrible job at solving this.

the minor league system pays significantly less than poverty wages. incentivizing kids to go that route instead of getting an education is terrible.

which is why so many dont, and go to college on scholarships anyway, which leads us right back where we started.

the right analogy to make IMO is ice hockey, especially the canadian model. There, you have well funded and professional-like "minor leagues" (called juniors close to same thing). you can't get paid but in the tier 1 leagues you have very little if not zero personal living expenses, it's like being on a full-ride at a big college program with room and board included. In canada, it's seen as the route potential NHLers take instead of continuing with school. you're not allowed to be paid, but there's a rule in place that for every year you play in that league you're owed one full year of college paid for. If you age out of the league and dont make it as a pro, you at least get 2-4 years of free college to go get the rest of your life together as compensation.

The US Junior system has some of those attributes but is more geared towards getting kids into NCAA scholarships. The thing there though, IMO, is that the money involve in that sport is right about at that sweet spot where i'd argue a full ride to school like notre dame or penn state is about right for the level of compensation owed.

all opinions above are my own, in the context of a former D1 ice hockey athlete who thinks the football players should probably be paid.

The Canadian Major Juniors are a great model. Of course, there also players who try out at MJ camps with their names obscured as not to jeopardize their NCAA eligibility.

Baseball's history of labor abuse ( read up on the history of free agency ) is why the Minors are a terrible mechanism.

In capitalist system, if the sport league doesn't make money should the workers be paid anything more than minimum wage?

minimum wage is minimum wage (IMO?), the business losing money only dictates how long that position will exist for, not change the compensation owed for performing employed work.

in minor league baseball, who's indepent teams may be anywhere on the spectrum of losing or making money but who are also affiliated with parent organizations that make hundreds of millions, there is a plethora of literature lately that accuses them of paying significantly less than US minimum wage. In many cases it appears the players pay them for the right to play when it's all done.

in the college hockey example i referred to, the D1 teams/leagues usually have decent revenue from tickets and tv deals but it's not a ton and i'd take a shot in the dark that most programs are pretty much breaking even after scholarships, staff, and facilities are accounted for. In that environment, having an athlete get "paid" maybe a $40k/year total package in scholarship, room and board, playing equipment and facilities use, and cash per diems on road trips is both above minimum wage and probably no more than they could reasonably expect if the league was "pro" and had nothing to do with college.

> Even in your scenario, there's nothing stopping the aspiring golfer from attending Stanford part-time while they try to make it in pro-golf.

Does Stanford allow part time undergraduates? A brief Googling suggests that generally they do not, unless there are special circumstances, but it wasn't clear what would count as special circumstances.

NBA? Sure. NFL? Yeah. They can probably fund and figure out the logistics for an operation like this.

What about all the other sports? At the moment, we've figured out a way to elevate less lucrative sports like track & field or swimming into a potential profession without making young people take massive risks by skipping higher education.

NBA? Sure. NFL? Yeah. They can probably fund and figure out the logistics for an operation like this. What about all the other sports?

I'm really struggling to come up with a reason this is the academy's problem to solve.

Its society's problem to solve. We shouldn't do away with college sports without a replacement avenue for people to get into high level sports.

Most people who want to do away with college sports seem okay with killing their professional leagues. We shouldn't be okay with that.

> Most people who want to do away with college sports seem okay with killing their professional leagues.

Not at all. I just believe professional leagues will be fine with or without near-professional-quality college teams. There's far too much money in professional sports for them to die out just because universities don't field teams. I refer you to European soccer leagues for an alternative model.

Moreover de-facto professional athletes playing for a pittance and getting a poor education on top of that makes my blood boil. Pay them proper wages and don't screw up their education. College football and basketball teams also have a tendency to suck up resources and attention away from the actual purpose of a university - which is to perform research and educate people.

It's exhausting to have to remind people in this thread that I'm talking about way more than the money maker sports.

There's not "far too much money" in professional swimming or track & field. Killing the college sports, subsidized by the money maker sports, may very well kill the professional leagues for many sports.

D1 basketball athletes be able to be paid. Absolutely. That doesn't change my opinion that college sports benefit society and are often worth the extra cost.

If professional swimming or track "benefits society", why doesn't the government fund it directly? That's how it works in most other countries. Why are universities shouldering that burden?

If you think "benefiting society" is how the US government chooses to fund things, I've got a bridge to sell you :)

I'm not sure I understand why we need to be so concerned as a country about the longevity of competitive rowing.

Sports are important. Being competitive is important. Having hobbies is important. Taking time to do something other than "real life" responsibilities is important.

Much of this relies on the inspiration people get from watching these sports, and exposure the sport gets from the professional leagues.

All of this in ingrained in American culture. Whether it's capitalism, or high level sports, or pick up ball. It's all the same ball game.

Calling out a single one of these is incredibly disingenuous. Would society worsen if we never had competitive rowing again? No. Would it worsen if we got rid of the 24 sports that the NCAA oversees? Absolutely.

> Sports are important. Being competitive is important. Having hobbies is important.

Even if I agreed with these unexplained assertions, none of this justifies collegiate varsity sports in the face of all the obstacles it places on the primary objective of university education, or indeed, the oddity of placing SAT scores and minimum GPAs as a barrier to professional athleticism.

Your thesis seems to be professional sports are a priori important, and until we can replace varsity sports that feed professional leagues with a non-affiliated minor league, varsity must not be allowed to end. But there's really only one professional league I can think of that absolutely depends on the NCAA for athlete training, and we all seem to agree they can afford to solve this threat to their highly profitable existence; Congress has even granted them an antitrust exemption so it seems entirely fair society demands they develop a solution.

Why is skipping higher education to try to play professionally a massive risk? If it doesn’t work out, you can go to college after. Lots of people get jobs right after high school, then go back to school later. Not only that, but those people are usually going to jobs with a lot less upside than being a professional athlete.

How do countries that are "not the US" produce swimmers or track and field athletes?

often through direct state sponsorship

I think Olympic athletes get government funding in the US as well.

There's also the possibility of firms like IMG funding athletes' expenses and training, in return for a cut of future earnings.

> I think Olympic athletes get government funding in the US as well.

This is incorrect.

"Unlike other national Olympic organizations, [Team USA] receives no government funds. It pays for its operations and helps fund athletes and the national governing bodies of its sports through the sale of media and sponsorship rights and some modest fund-raising." - NYT

Just because someone doesn’t go to college at 18 doesn’t mean they’re “skipping” higher education. Spending a few years making 30k a year to play basketball would be awesome - my father had teammates in college who put off grad/med school to go play in a shitty European leagues or random minor leagues around North America, it never sounded like they regretted it.

If they followed Hockey’s example, where playing a year in the MJ gives you a year of tuition, it could work out great for young players.

If they can't make money to pay athletes, maybe they do not deserve to survive. We don't subsidise aspiring people in most other fields, why should sports be any different.

> We don't subsidise aspiring people in most other fields

Yes we do. It's called merit based scholarships.

This comment is getting downvotes and given my experience playing D1 college, getting a STEM degree, this scenario is in no way possible.

Stanford on its own is one of the top golf programs in the country. Its practice facility is absurdly good (my team was able to use it once when we were out there. The reason we were in the bay area? Because we took our spring breaks to go play fancy courses with rich alumni to get them to donate to the athletic department, which is another part of money you don't see but athletics gets.) You need to be really, really good to play at Stanford.

Second, college golf is a case where, because of the niceties like practice facilities, tournaments, where you don't pay for any of that, it's a feeder to the main tour. In fact, PGA Tour University[0] came out to help get guys who were good in college to the Tour quicker. The quality of guys in lower level tours is crazy, and this is a deserved bumper for the good guys. Guys play in college first because that's where you grow.

I'm very anti-NCAA. Each sport is different in terms of growing to the professional level though, and how engrained the NCAA is in most cases though makes it tough to have an overall solution.

[0] https://www.pgatour.com/university/what-you-need-to-know-faq...

You're getting bogged down in the details of my example. I know a good amount of people who played D1 sports. One went pro and is competing in the Olympics this year. The others used their degrees to get "normal" jobs when they weren't able to go pro (or had no intention to in the first place). All of them would not have had the opportunity to compete at a high level in their sports without forgoing their higher education.

I was friends with quite a few D1 athletes when I was at college. Their sports took up so much of their time that they were only able to put minimum effort into academics. In fact, the coaches and staff would help guid them into known easy classes, so they would be able to maintain their grades while working 40+ hours a week in their sport.

It would make so much more sense for them to just hold off on school, go try to make it as a professional athlete, and then go back to school if it didn’t work.

No other country ties sports and athletics like the US does. Good soccer players in other countries sign contract at 10 years old, and play for the academy while getting paid.

So maybe we don't need so many professional sports players.

Who needs those sports balls on the television, right?

Given that college sports mostly loose money for schools[1], why do we think its OK to ask students and (for public colleges) taxpayers to subsidize professional sports' feeder system?

I went to a large state school (SUNY Buffalo) where the administration wanted to go division 1 when I was there in the early 90s. Transitioning to division 1 came along with a large (to us) mandatory athletic fee. The student body voted against this multiple times, and then the administration simply stopped asking and went division 1 anyway (and imposed the fee).

[1]:https://www.bestcolleges.com/blog/do-college-sports-make-mon...

So in-state tuition at UB would be around $4850 instead of $5200 without sports. Out-of-state would be around $13,750 vs $14,100.

Would life be significantly better without sports at UB, if students were given back a few hundred dollars? Would alumni donations go down without the occasional March Madness appearance? Or Bulls games?

When people make this argument, they make it seem like schools would all of a sudden be able to afford a massively better educational experience. That's just not the case.

Speaking from experience, the administration's disregard for the wishes of the student body pissed me off enough that I didn't donate anything to them for 15 years or so after graduation (until William Greiner, the president who presided over this had retired). Others in my peer group felt the same way, and I imagine did the same thing.

In terms of the impact of the fee: When I went to school, the tuition was $675/semester, and the fee was over $100 (I don't recall if that was per semester or per year). So that was at least a 7% increase in cost. Its sad the tuition has gone up so much.

It sounds like life would be significantly better without sports. 5200 vs 4850 is $350. That is the difference of a month of rent in Buffalo for your room, snow tires on your car that year or not, text books or not.

So around 24 hours of 15$/h minimum wage labour so that someone else can do something they could be doing on their own dime... That sounds very excessive burden to be placed on students. For something they gain very little from...

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