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Comment by lofatdairy | Hacker News Reader

Cui bono?

There are a lot of problems with the Ivy League, the lack of athletic scholarships are one of the few things they do absolutely right. The thing is that athletics are less, not more democratic as a distribution mechanism for admission slots. The author seems to be under the mistaken belief that most of these slots would be available for your football and basketball players, where stories of rising from poverty are commonplace at the highest level. That's simply not the case at Ivies. You think underrepresented and the economically disadvantaged are rowing or playing squash or fencing or golfing or diving at the level where this would matter? Sure, there are ways of making this equitable, but that's not solved by the scope of this argument.

The fact is that athletics has been a backdoor for admissions, and always used to exclude, not to include, those outside the upper class. The college admission scandal showed as much, with the Stanford sailing coach. It has historical roots in excluding Jewish students, and it's currently used to exclude Asian students among maintaining a proportion of elite students.

Certainly, it looks like price fixing, and I don't have a problem with that argument, but I would prefer is more universities took courage to actually focus on academics like chicago, caltech, mit, etc.

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>the lack of athletic scholarships are one of the few things they do absolutely right. The thing is that athletics are less, not more democratic as a distribution mechanism for admission slots

A more basic problem with "athletic scholarships" is that being an athlete has absolutely nothing to do with being an academic/scholar/student of something else.

It might be a good way to bring some publicity to the school, and to make it have a strong team. But it has absolutely nothing to do with a school's intended purpose (except the "make money" purpose).

Athletic scholarships should only be a thing in sports academies - where you're trained to be a coach, a PE teacher, or a related academic in some of those areas.

In fact, universities and colleges should just have clubs to play sports informally, at the same level they have a music playing club, or a gym, or a cooking club. Like in the rest of the civilized (on that matter at least) world.

A university is not just a place to go to learn anymore. It’s a big club that happens to be a place where you study.

You bond and make lifelong friends. Also a great place to find a partner for life.

Athletic departments are vital to the university system in American schools and their local economies.

Agree. A lot of the frustration and confusion here seems to be due to assuming these universities should just serve the smartest kids. The truth is that in practice they provide credentials for both elites and experts, and the former need not be brainiacs.

>A university is not just a place to go to learn anymore. It’s a big club that happens to be a place where you study.

Yes. That should stop.

>Athletic departments are vital to the university system in American schools and their local economies.

That too.

As cost of university education spirals out of control, I expect that different forms of education, producing comparable levels of knowledge without all the expensive frills, will emerge, and be accepted by most employers. Of course places like MIT or Stanford won't be affected. A lot of smaller-caliber colleges will be.

You could learn most things in a library for free. One of the big advantages of a University is being around other ambitious people at the same point in their career. The “big club” aspect is an important part of the value proposition.

We should definitely dump athletic departments, though, they are completely unrelated to the mission.

As a faculty member at my institution put it: "Where in the land-grant university mission is giving our students traumatic brain injuries?"

One of the big advantages of a university is that they give you credentials you can show to your employer (including university itself if you want to be a scientist). Everything else is 90% wishful thinking.

That leads to product bundling you describe, which should be vigorously fought with antitrust laws.

If it's a big club, it's hard to justify the vast and ongoing federal support to the institutions through the grants, loan programs, and tax advantaged status.

This!

I love the honesty in this thread, higher Eds main value prop, outside of stem, has been the connections made.

However, no one to my knowledge has validate that assumption and my gut is telling me it's probably BS for the majority of people.

Let's see how that holds up when QE doesn't come back. IMO it's mostly around deal flow and finance where this plays out and I'd guess the percentage is very small that walk away with that value.

I get the value of the major D1 college sports teams in the university experience, but honestly who gives a shit if Harvard is good at golf or not? I don't imagine anyone outside of people on the e.g. squash team are impacted by squash at Harvard. Same goes for non-elite (in the socioeconomic sense) sports like track and field.

I love sports and I think we need more opportunities for recreational play of sports after high school. But I just don't get the point of schools with middling varsity teams in unpopular sports continuing to pour resources into those teams.

I'd love to know if there are good reasons for it I'm missing though.

I would actually argue the opposite. Sports clubs are a great way for students to bond, to socialise, and to organise - not the only one, but around here, clearly an alternative to traditional student clubs and study associations.

This is fine and dandy for up to middling levels of achievement. But universities have no business being in professional sports. They do have a business accommodating professional athletes of a variety of sports, but that's where the mid-level sports clubs come in: enough decent facilities to stay in shape, but not required to provide Olympic-level of training.

If sports clubs want to aim higher, it's up to their (student-run) board to get there. Basically: universities should provide decent facilities, not run the teams.

How will Chad Chaddington III become a Harvard man if they dont have a good Lacrosse team?

Every human groups can be also a place where you "bond and make lifelong friends. Also a great place to find a partner for life". Regardless of activity and regardless if that group, like a chess club or drama society, has athletic scolarship level favoritism or not.

No, athletic departments are not vital for the above social secondary benefits of an education, just one of the hundreds others out there providing bonds and lifelong friends without this level of special treatment. For educational and academic purpose of universities it is even less vital, a tiny tiny fraction of the educated people rely vitally on this receiving good education throughout the history and around the world. If it was gone it was not missed much, mostly by athletics not graduates, academics and educators.

> Also a great place to find a partner for life.

All I read here is “it’s a great tool for social reproduction and stratification”. This is dystopian. We’ve seen what this mindset gave with Oxbridge, and it is toxic.

The US college sports system is mainly a feeding ground for professional sports teams, and none of that is necessary for either education or social destratification.

It is only vital in the sense that people have vested interests in it, but it's not to the benefit of the students.

For many students, the sport team culture and the activities surrounding these events is a big draw and motivator to attend university.

Most college athletes will not play at the professional level. Their young adult connections and the values they develop as being part of a team to overcome great challenges in preparation and on game day are important to our society. The stress one feels for a final exam does not compare to the emotions one feels on a big game-day! Valuable mental models are developed from athletics. Lessons learned are applied to every industry. it’s important simulation.

To deduce it all to irrelevance is a mistake that many intelligent people with no team or sporting experience often make to no fault of their own.

College athletes who are going pro are studying their chosen field just as studiously as any other field (and more than most business/communications majors). Athletes who aren’t going pro, which is most of them, do better than average academically.

Being an athlete isn’t particularly different than getting a minor or a dual major. Just because there’s sweating involved doesn’t make it not a scholarly pursuit, we should stop being such gatekeepers.

>Being an athlete isn’t particularly different than getting a minor or a dual major. Just because there’s sweating involved doesn’t make it not a scholarly pursuit, we should stop being such gatekeepers.

From a certain perspective there is little that separates sports from a lot of arts majors. Someone studying acting is very unlikely to turn that into a profession just like a football player. Why does running around on a field have less intellectual value than doing make believe on a stage? They are both glorified hobbies. If someone can study one as a major, why not the other?

The NBA sends letters to D1 college basketball players, emphasizing to them the value of their studies, as less than 1% of them will make it to the NBA.

I expect that most arts majors have at least 1% doing that thing.

They may not be rock stars, but I expect that 1% of music majors are at least playing, be it local orchestras or bands or live or canned music (jingles, etc.).

Seems like your measures of success are rather uneven. There are plenty of jobs related to sports that don't include playing professionally. If playing in a local orchestra counts as success, why not coaching the local high school team?

I was never trying to talk about levels of success. There's nothing wrong with (to use your example) being involved as a teacher, or in sports management, at college.

I meant more the fact that even at least one of the pro sports leagues tries to remind even people who are doing extremely well in the sport, that as well as they've done, that next step as a player is going to be even harder. So to not neglect things in single-minded pursuit of "I'm going to the NBA" (because you're probably not).

>I meant more the fact that even at least one of the pro sports leagues tries to remind even people who are doing extremely well in the sport, that as well as they've done, that next step as a player is going to be even harder. So to not neglect things in single-minded pursuit of "I'm going to the NBA" (because you're probably not).

Sure, but the next step of going from drama school to a professional actor is also extremely hard. There may not be a central authority like the NBA directly stating that to college kids, but most people won't be able to make that transition either.

>Why does running around on a field have less intellectual value than doing make believe on a stage?

In a culture that asks this question seriously, "intellectual value" might not be needed in general (except in some specific niches)

This is the typical response when mentioning the value of sport on HN. You just scoff at the notion without providing a single reason why acting is a more intellectual pursuit than football. You're assuming the reasoning is obvious and that is likely a sign that you haven’t done any serious thinking about the question.

>You just scoff at the notion without providing a single reason why acting is a more intellectual pursuit than football.

You do understand the definition of "intellectual", as in "intellectual pursuit"?

And how it is meant to specifically exclude physical activity and things like sports (except if you include something like chess as a sport)?

You're still sidestepping my original question, but to answer yours here is the definition of "intellectual" from the Cambridge Dictionary[1]:

-relating to your ability to think and understand things, especially complicated ideas

-very educated and interested in studying and other activities that involve careful thinking and mental effort

What do you find intellectual about acting or chess? The same almost assuredly applies to football, but it can be difficult to see if you don't even give sports any consideration in that regard.

You seem to be dismissing the mental aspects of sports because of the physicality involved, but physicality is a huge part of acting and even chess puts huge physical stress on one's body. People have literally died playing chess due to the physical stress. Subjects don't fall into a binary categorization of physical or mental. Sports, like many disciplines of art, requires both to varying degrees.

[1] - https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/intel...

> A more basic problem with "athletic scholarships" is that being an athlete has absolutely nothing to do with being an academic/scholar/student of something else.

Welcome to 1910.

> It might be a good way to bring some publicity to the school, and to make it have a strong team. But it has absolutely nothing to do with a school's intended purpose (except the "make money" purpose).

It engages people who care about sports but don't really care about the research being performed there. Most people attending universities never get an advanced degree. I wouldn't even consider a JD or MBA an advanced degree so much as a professional certificate masquerading as advanced education.

> Athletic scholarships should only be a thing in sports academies - where you're trained to be a coach, a PE teacher, or a related academic in some of those areas.

Meanwhile, former athletes who were able to attend universities due to athletics and have since become wealthy regularly donate millions to their alma maters.

> In fact, universities and colleges should just have clubs to play sports informally, at the same level they have a music playing club, or a gym, or a cooking club. Like in the rest of the civilized (on that matter at least) world.

Well, it turns out that universities are full of educated people and they've run the numbers. The numbers say that athletics are an attraction to universities for students and alumni alike.

>Welcome to 1910.

Is that an argument? The "newer is better" kind? Perhaps 1910 had that part figured out better than 2023.

>Well, it turns out that universities are full of educated people and they've run the numbers. The numbers say that athletics are an attraction to universities for students and alumni alike.

I never argued it doesn't make them money or that the bean counters there can't see that.

Just that it's (or oughta be) unrelated with the goals of an academic institution, whether it's lucrative or not.

> Is that an argument? The "newer is better" kind? Perhaps 1910 had that part figured out better than 2023.

The NCAA has been around and has regulated athletic scholarships in its current form since 1910. They're the ones who stepped in and said that athletes needed to be students at the universities they represented. That's good for the universities AND good for the athletes.

> I never argued it doesn't make them money or that the bean counters there can't see that.

> Just that it's (or oughta be) unrelated with the goals of an academic institution, whether it's lucrative or not.

Then you don't have any more universities aside from a few flagships and deeply endowed private institutions, because they have fundamentally different objectives than they did at the beginning of last century.

They don't have athletic scholarships because admission is need-blind for all students and you will only pay what your family is able to. But they still have "slots" for athletic admissions, where each coach gets to pick who they admit, and as long as they clear the minimum bar (which is different for each sport) of GPA and test scores, they will be admitted early. It's not technically "athletic scholarships" but it may as well be.

What it does mean is that an excellent athlete from a rich family will choose Stanford over Harvard, because Stanford will pay them a scholarship even though they don't "need it." This is one reason why Stanford athletics are superior to those of Ivy League schools.

This is absolutely spot on. Don't forget sailing, tennis, lacrosse, and some Ivy League schools even offer equestrian. Even sports like swimming, hockey, and volleyball are getting to be more and more dominated by well-to-do kids from families that can afford expensive traveling club teams. When Brown tried to eliminate its men's track and field team a few years ago the decision was reversed when it was pointed out that track and field was one of the only sports adding diversity to the campus.

> It has historical roots in excluding Jewish students

I'm glad the Ivy (Penn) that I graduated from over thirty years ago was enlightened enough to admit good students regardless of whether they were Jewish. Or Asian.

> athletics has been a backdoor for admissions ... used to exclude ... those outside the upper class.

The student athlete I knew, my roommate Tony Tomaska, was the son of a Chicago policeman. He played for the football team. He was working class, not upper class.

I do recommend the Third Reich in the Ivy League as a generally good read, which highlights the significantly more nazi-sympathetic student body at harvard with the more activist population at Columbia, largely in part due to the fact that Columbia failed to attract the white elites of NYC and had a larger Jewish population as a result.

>The student athlete I knew, my roommate Tony Tomaska, was the son of a Chicago policeman. He played for the football team. He was working class, not upper class.

Yeah I don't deny that a lot of athletes are from disadvantageous backgrounds, I was only to highlight that the sports we associate w/ that fact do not make up a lot of other sports in the ivy league, and that if your goal diversity, you should just increase admissions of disadvantaged students, not use athletics as a proxy.

FYI it’s “The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower”

there may be something good in the book(?) but talk about a title that makes the author sound unhinged

how about "vestiges of old fashioned bias remain in the ivory tower" or something

It wasn't "vestiges" for there to be support for the third reich while it was gaining power.

I could see your point if the book wasn't talking about the 30s, but it was talking about the 30s.

Ah, that's right, apologies, I should have double checked the title before replying.

I’m familiar with some very creepy attitudes the local land grant college had toward Nazi Germany.

Was this an Ivy League thing or a higher ed thing?

Much of the early 20th century was spent building US higher education around the German model.

The post WWII period was a golden age for social progress. Along with the final collapse of colonial empires ruled over by royal families came a corresponding breaking down of class and overt ethnic/racial barriers in the West and America, with universities using test scores to open their doors to students of merit regardless of background or gender.

but that golden age, having achieved remarkable success, is over. It was predicted by somebody-nobody-listened-to that strip-mining IQ and EQ talent from various communities and elevating them to elite status would leave behind communities more deeply impoverished and dysfunctional than they were before. And what is our politics today but that exact battle?

Did life improve in the post-colonial world? There don’t seem to be too many 1950s era success stories in this regard.

life has generally improved for everybody, everywhere in the world, as it was also the time of the green revolution, antibiotics, etc., and many former colonies revel in their self governance even while their politics seem even more dysfunctional than western politics. But you might be making the point that some former colonies would have been better off remaining as colonies, a hill I am not willing to defend, let alone die on.

America, Canada and Australia benefited from being English colonies, but that's sort of tautological because they were originally colonies settled with English people, apart from indigenous peoples and later arrivals.

Hard to say if indigenous people are better off, certainly particular indigenous people have been worse off, and there's certainly the enduring popular romantic notion that being a hunter gatherer is peak evolution for us/them and the tiny sustainable populations of the nomadic invaders and such of several continents were entitled to be left alone to battle each other for supremacy while collectively hogging those resources for themselves, free from having to battle anybody else for them.

But personally, while descended from hunter gatherers, I'm glad I'm not a hunter gatherer myself (he said, typing on his silicon dream machine) though considering it, I would have made a great one tempermentally.

We have more trinkets yes, but in exchange we've been reduced to a deracinated blob with no hope or future, now in a state of terminal decline

More chattel does not necessarily mean a better life. Dictators that look more like you are not necessarily more beneficent.

> Did life improve in the post-colonial world? There don’t seem to be too many 1950s era success stories in this regard

"Prior to deindustrialisation, India was one of the largest economies in the world, accounting for approximately one quarter of the global economy.... The Indian economy specialised in industrialisation and manufacturing, accounting for at least one quarter of the world's manufacturing output before the 18th century."

in 1900 it was 2%. There were huge famines under Colonial rule, the kind that would male Mao proud.

India is doing so much better now, its not even comparable.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-industrialisation_of_Indi...

Yes but what about academic back doors?

I was admitted to a college because I was really interested in a major they started offering and wanted to promote.

I just got one of my children admitted to a very selective private school because “wanted” to participate in a program they had just begun.

Schools always have programs and initiatives they are pushing, and give preference to students who want to use them.

How do you become aware of these programs and initiatives and their level of preference in the eyes of the school? Do you happen to have personal connections with people in the school administration or admissions office and find out by word of mouth? Or are you trying to infer what's important to them from some publicly-available information like the school's website/newsletter/twitter/press releases?

That’s a really great question -

* in the case of my college, I knew what I wanted, and was shopping around for it. The major was a very unusual one - not even a major as much as a program (“great books”).

* in the case of my daughter, I knew the school because I had taught there decades ago.

* there are admissions consultants who keep track of these sorts of things and make it a point to know all the side doors.

At the end of the day, colleges admissions should be about matching students and colleges who fit together. If a student isn’t as competitive, but is still a great fit, they should I get extra points for that.

But this can be come a system those with money abuse. But that abuse takes the form of lying about whether they are a good fit for the college they are going to - which is dumb.

If a student gets into Harvard by saying they really want to pursue the newly introduced degree of “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion” - is Harvard really a good fit?

> fencing

Tangent: take certain physical education courses at MIT and you can get a 'unofficial' pirate certificate:

> An underground campus custom has become an official and increasingly famous part of MIT culture. Although student pirates have roamed campus informally for decades, in 2011 the Department of Athletics, Physical Education, and Recreation (DAPER) began issuing MIT pirate certificates to students who completed specific requirements. Six students earned the inaugural certificates and, today, 354 MIT students and alumni have received certificates at a spring ritual—Pirate Induction Day.

* https://alum.mit.edu/slice/arrrr-mit-pirates-and-matt-damon-...

> The MIT Pirate Certificate became available in the Fall of 2011. Students who have completed Archery, Fencing, Pistol (Air Pistol or Rifle) and Sailing should send an email to […]

* https://physicaleducationandwellness.mit.edu/about/pirate-ce...

Netflix has a docu-series called "Last Chance U" about the junior college athletic system and how it operates.

I knew intellectually that college athletes were coddled academically and while it's hard not to root for the individuals depicted in the documentary to succeed it's also hard not to think that there must be dozens of kids at the schools where they come from that were more academically inclined and could have made better use of the resources provided to the student athletes.

Having played college ball at an high end academic school a few thoughts here.

Last Chance U is great and a great insight, I really enjoy the show, and get heart broken for these kids. You can't really get schaudenfraude when they fail like other shows or dramas.

But there's a few things you may not have caught, which seems to be the same across most college sports and just exacerbates as you become more competitive/make more cash like a D1 school.

When I was in season I spent 5-8 hours a day on the sport. 3 hours for practice, 1-2 hours reading scouting reports, in rehab, working out, or watching film. On game day it was a good 8 hours if we weren't traveling, a full day if we were (longest bus ride was 7.5 h each way). We calculated that we spent around 3600 hours in sports over 4 years. That's over a part time job and nearing full time job while working.

This makes it real hard to get to normal tutoring sessions which are in the afternoon many places. Or to labs, or office hours, etc. At my school the athletic department (ad) just got the big classes to setup tutoring sessions in the athletic complex (ac). They were open to anyone actually. But we had better discipline (a coach would sit in on many sessions and deal with any disruptions) and better hours so we got some of the best tutors to show up. My physics 101 tutor had to move to the gym he was so popular.

Now move to Last Chance U... kids who have been failed in many ways by high schools who didn't teach them, parents, themselves, or just not being quite good enough to "make it" but not ready to realize that. They need a ton of help. This is very much the last chance for these kids at ball or making it through that avenue. Making it via sports is what 80% of these kids think is literally their only option. Tho there's the lineman in the first season was like "it'll get me a degree and out of the factory."

But if you pay attention, most of those sessions the players are at, they're for all of the students, who also have guidance counselors. The difference is just that the Athletic Department pays for a guidance counselor, and the coach is a surrogate parent for these kids (who happens to work there), and the GC and the coaches, they talk and these kids have to stay eligible to play or to go to the school. Normal students can ignore the GC, and fail out, and they're not on TV. The players can't.

If you haven't played school sports or don't have kids who play sports, a coach can often wield more influence over a kid than parents can. My friend just immigrated, his kid was playing sports, and my friend was lamenting his kid was slacking off. I suggested he email the coach. That evening the kid apologized to his dad and set up a study schedule he showed his dad and his grades went up a letter over the next month. Basically the coach brought the kid to his office during study hour and said "you're going to run a lot and your play time is going to go down if you don't get your grades back up." that's all it took. As a regular parent generally if you said "go run till you puke or realize you should get your grades up" you'd get laughed at.

> If you haven't played school sports or don't have kids who play sports, a coach can often wield more influence over a kid than parents can.

I heard a (possibly apocryphal) story. One of Tony Dungy's kids was playing high school football, and was just grabbing a slice of toast for breakfast. Tony tells him "you need a bigger meal with protein before practice."

A week later he sees his son getting up early to make a big breakfast, and comments on it. His son says "yeah, coach told me I need to eat more"

An athletic scholarship seems both exciting and controversial ... until you calculate the hours that go into it and realize you could literally do better financially flipping burgers. Still, there is a useful and notable je na sais quoi about athletes, and the way they approach life, that is not fully valued by the academic community-- a drive for practicality, achievement, teamwork. Frankly a lot of the demeaning comments in this board are silly.

I turned down Harvard many years ago for not offering athletics scholarships-- I could not reasonably afford school any other way. And, I was laughed at for years by those in the know of the "need based" assistance framework. One thing that made it unaffordable in my case was they wanted a year of prep school on top of high school which definitely is exclusionary. But, if a Bloomberg contributor can fail to see a pathway equivalent to a scholarship for someone who financially cannot attend any other way, I'd say there is something to the author's grievance.

I mean flipping burgers doesn't really help as much in the long run. My college teammates and friends that I met through sports ended up being a pretty solid network. So many CFOs, VPs, etc obviously. But one Federal Judge, one Secret Service agent, one FBI Agent. The Secret Service guy actually walked onto the practice field his first day (this is D3 small school) having been a 2 way all state player in high school and said "I'm literally never going to touch the field" because everyone was so much bigger and more athletic than him at even a non-scholarship school. He stuck with it all 4 years though. That kid had grit as they say.

Interesting, what was the prep school? My school required 4 years of math/science in HS which is a thing many US schools don't require but if you're a top student you can go for. One kid I played with only had 2 years of HS. He spent the whole summer on campus from like 3 days after HS graduation to 3 days into football taking stats, physics, chemistry, and college algebra to get him up to snuff. I think that may be similar to the prep you're talking about. He ended up doing fine (average grades) in the B school, and I believe is a arson investigator now.

The whole American system of collage sports is just totally strange to Europeans.

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