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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>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.

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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.

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