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.
Yes. That should stop.
>Athletic departments are vital to the university system in American schools and their local economies.
That too.
We should definitely dump athletic departments, though, they are completely unrelated to the mission.
That leads to product bundling you describe, which should be vigorously fought with antitrust laws.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is only vital in the sense that people have vested interests in it, but it's not to the benefit of the students.
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.