Athletics cost colleges, students millions
usatoday.com
usatoday.com
But sports are weird and mysterious to me. They seem to integrate so strongly into people's identities that they're willing to overlook any number of rational issues with them. At times it becomes downright bizarre and cultish - Penn State football. I think sports are mildly interesting, but nowhere interesting enough to have the esteemed place of prominence that it has in the educational system.
When I was growing up, I studied in my school's music program, and I remember attending many school board meetings where we had to justify our existence to receive any funding at all. We squeaked by with a combination of reducing budget, bake sales, corporate donations and a teacher going unpaid for a semester. And there were other challenges, ancient equipment, incomplete scores and no money to buy more (outfitting a 100 piece orchestra with music to read off of is very expensive) and on and on. We got very good at fundraising.
Meanwhile the school sports teams got new uniforms for free every season (music kids had to either provide their own instruments or rent them from the school), equipment was mostly new, regular morning announcements let people know about sporting related events, the school newspaper was 40-50% dedicated to the sports teams and students were forced en masse to attend rallies for the sports team in the middle of the academic day. When I was there my 30 year old school got a new state of the art stadium that occupied several acres of school property. They claimed it was to support all of the students, but it was only ever used for sporting events.
Support to the music program? Not once in middle or high school was an upcoming music program event mentioned on the morning announcements, and only one time that I can recall did the school paper mention a music program -- it was to let everybody know that an exchange program hosted by the music program was underway and we were about to have a bunch of foreign students attending classes with us. Students were encouraged to make nice nice with the foreign kids and invite them to sporting events to make them feel welcome.
When my school's orchestra won a prestigious national competition it was never announced and the trophy we won wasn't allowed to mix with the sports trophies in the school's trophy case. So it sat in the music teacher's office, which was a converted janitorial room. Our yearbooks had 30 pages dedicated to action shots for the school's sports teams, the music program (4 orchestras, 3 bands and 2 choirs) had to jam onto one page. Our national win was cut in editing.
Like most high schools the cheerleaders and football players were minor celebrities able to get away with any number of school infractions including physical violence and property destruction against music program kids and their instruments.
I hated school sports teams.
One of the reasons I went to the college I went to was that it had no well known sports team and the President of the college refused to fund a stronger sports program citing research like the OPs that it was a waste of money for the schools. Our sports arena was more likely to be used for circus performances and concerts than basketball or hockey.
I agreed with his stance and secretly enjoyed watching the sports program kids learning how to raise equipment funds and fight for notice like the arts kids had to do.
And then he retired, his replacement poured money into the sports program and in a couple of years one of them made it into a national tournament. The sports program exploded, new teams were added, sports pavilions were added, practice fields were cut out of wooded parts of the campus.
I hated that once again, sports were finding this kind of irrational support.
And then...almost overnight my school went from being a virtually unknown to the largest one in the state with individual schools getting ranked in the top 10 in the country. Money and endowments started flooding in, new performing arts centers, science, tech and R&D buildings started construction. Entire new dormitory blocks sprang up. Two, all new, state of the art sports centers opened up and were opened to the local community. Why? The school president was able to spin the sports teams success into money raising (fund raising, donations, loans) opportunities to invest in every other aspect of the school.
So...I think I learned a powerful lesson. Sure sports look like a parasite on schools, sucking out way more then they appear to immediately return. But used as a tool, the new president was able to benefit the entire school in ways his predecessor could never have dreamed of. So yeah, I feel a sense of school pride, and while it's not about the sports teams, I have to recognize that it's because of the sports teams.
This year they spent a truly staggering amount of money, given they're a city of 20,000 in the rust belt with a persistent unemployment problem - on Astroturf for the football field.
To be fair, they have pretty decent facilities for science labs, etc. They have great support for drama. They're not a really bad school at all (we especially liked their AP program). But the preference for rock star treatment of athletes is truly weird to me, and I grew up in that same county.
Regardless of the money spent (or made, if college sports could be run profitable somehow), there seems to be a huge cost for society by setting the focus on the wrong things.
It seems that being a good student is valued highly by society, but the shortcut - becoming a (sports) star is even better! This leads to a large percentage of young people investing significant resources (time, energy, health) into this dream.
Professional sports is just entertainment, and assuming that the enjoyment comes from a relative comparison between players and teams, or the delta between two rather abstract numbers (this performance, compared to a "record"), then it seems that there are some resources not spent well.
I cannot see how sports and educations should be married the way they are at american colleges. Anyone?
On the other hand, I suppose it does serve as advertising. Probably a lot more people know of Stanford because of its occasionally excellent football and basketball teams than know of it because of what it has done for computing.
That does not have to be a innate property of education. It's just how science education seems to work, and other education mock science education.
Not saying it's the wrong mode for science education, but.
Anyway, that sports and education are so tangled is purely a national oddity of the US, maybe stemming from its tradition of great, and expensive, private universities. During the 19th century, if I recall correctly, it was a sign of distinction and wealth to practice sports; I conjecture that's what got it started in the universities, and then it spread in the early 20th century, when those colleges started courting new talent, intellectual or otherwise, from the up and coming middle classes, helped by the New Deal and the GI Bill.
That could also be why Oxford and Cambridge are relatively so keen on sports, i.e. rowing, as compared to other European universities. Sports were quite the posh thing back then. But, of course, I'm just guessing.
I liked this defense of DIII (and this vision for college sports):
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/04/22/should-colle...
Sounds good. I propose having more real tutors and assistant teachers to get the mentioned benefits directly. Practice team building in, say, engineering competitions.
If you want to offer sports, don't just have an elite team in one of the big sports (telling people they are not good enough to take part, putting people into a spectator role, giving them artificial entities to root for), but offer a wide variety of popular stuff for the whole student body.
Right there is the failure of the American experiment.
Beyond that, philosophy and classics are interesting citations because the healthy, important parts of philosophy have mostly been shucked into science (http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html, or William James's Pragmatism) and classics are interesting but the corpus is static; it is not easy to come up with new and interesting things to say about The Iliad
In 1946, I'm sure someone was writing about the decline of theology and Latin and lamenting the failure of the American experiment.
(Despite what I wrote above I am still against the giving of scholarships for sports and think that the pro sports run by big-deal programs should be treated as professions, which they are by any reasonable standard of the word).
Add to that the "running the university like a business" - which generally means jacking up CEO pay into the stratosphere while cranking the productivity screws on adjuncts and raising prices for the customers (which in an earlier world were "students") - and you have the recipe for the ruination of the university, just as you have the recipe for the ruination of everything else American corporatism touches.
These programs are sold as advertising - which is insane. Seriously. If you want to compete for students, then make sure your students have fulfilling and/or lucrative careers (whichever your students are optimizing for) - don't sell them on which college is fun. You do that, you're not going to get quality students - and that means low-quality end product, a failing reputation in the job market, and you'll end up having to pay even more for a president who says he can fix it all. Wash, rinse, and repeat.
For all 227 Division I athletic departments of public universities, subsidies provide 30% of the overall budget, other revenue 70%. So when people complain about this issue, it really probably isn't any of the universities that they think it is.
Check it out yourself: http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/sports/college/story/2012-05-...
I'm however surprised to hear that football isn't a big moneymaker for universities. I remember being told that Kentucky, a famous place for basketball, makes more off of football, and a quick search seems to confirm that:
http://kykernel.com/2012/09/17/less-funding-could-hurt-uk-fo...
Kentucky made $18 million off of football for 2012-2013, while making only $8 million off of its wildly popular basketball program. All other sports combined lost $11.6 million.
Still a pretty nice little profit. Maybe their math is a bit different.
The only relevant startup lesson I can see in this story, is its the same old pattern where entrenched interests have a huge financial stake in growing, and no opposition exists, resulting in the eventual death or disability of the host. Its the cancer lifecycle. As a design pattern, it kills businesses (like universities... or startups) just as well as it kills people.
Anytime money flows out, have to find some force to oppose it, or inevitably all the money will eventually flow out that direction.
That's what makes it very weird that they specifically selected a fifth year senior in an entrepreneurship program, of all things, to quote. Someone in marketing? Sure. Someone in phys therapy? Sure. Someone in "newscasting/communications"? Sure. But an entrepreneur of all people has the very least resources to be drilling unpatchable holes in his new companies money bucket.
Wait a minute. I'll agree that student athletes ought to be paid something, the current arrangement is exploitation. But I'm not sure that starting a athlete salary arms-race is the answer.
And what about students who (end up) contributing disproportionately through research & development (patents, and patent licensing)?
>I'm however surprised to hear that football isn't a big moneymaker for universities.
Isn't everyone? Someone finally addressed the myth that pouring money into athletics is like buying golden egg laying geese. Good.
If college sports were not about making money, I would have no problem with student athletes not making money. But college sports are all about making money, and they are making it off students who have such a time commitment with their chosen sport that they cannot afford to major in something that will lead to a decent career afterwards. Sure, there are the stars who will go on to the NBA or NFL, but for the rest of the student athletes I'm not convinced that this is a great investment in their future.
The public land grant universities tend to fill a similar role at the regional level due to the geographic expanse of the US relative to European countries - e.g. Alabama is about the size of England as a catchment area.
It might be argued that the US minor league baseball system maps onto the European football pyramid model - but it is probably a mistake. Unlike the lower tiers of the footballing pyramid which tend to consist of independent teams which sell players on for profit, minor league baseball consists almost entirely of developmental teams affiliated with major league franchises and have their rosters and lineups and substitution patterns dictated from above rather than in the interest of points on the scoreboard or standings.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_Independent_Tech...
The main campus for Lanier Tech (2 year school) is right next to the four year Gainesville State College, and they have a credit transfer agreement. They rarely have sports programs on the level of a university.
Plenty of examples exist, but it's clear that the periodic backlash against college sports is not a prevailing trend.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_League
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_Athletic_Association
[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/14/sports/at-spelman-dropping...
As a CS person I believe that computing/CS is largely irrelevant (like much of science) unless someone, somewhere is making money from its applications. Also keep in mind that non-athletes also end up benefiting. At a coarse level - (in strictly discretionary spending) - people buy tickets, misc gear, subscribe to the internet/cable, purchase large screen TV's to watch games, etc.
Sports is a great common uniting activity for the masses. Geeks/Engineer types get hired to work on shopping websites, ticketing backend systems, payment gateways, wireless HD video chipsets and whatnot.
Even Google who hires all the 'academics' puts them to work so someone somewhere can click a button to buy something while watching a YouTube video (probably sports related :P)
That overly broad statement was made without citing any evidence. The handful of anecdotes that follow don't support the claim of "nearly every university". If there were any studies that support this claim, the author should have cited them. Otherwise, we just have to assume that they're making it up.
"The latest annual update to USA Today’s mammoth database on revenue and expenses at institutions in Division I of the National Collegiate Athletic Association notes that just 22 athletic departments are operating in the black. Spending across the 227 public universities for which USA Today could gather data rose by $267 million from a year earlier."
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/05/16/texas-to...
And that's just Division I. Care to make an argument that football teams in either of Divisions II or III are cash cows?
Division I schools probably have much higher expenses (more and better paid coaches, more spending on stadiums and other infrastructure, more perks for the players, etc.), so it's not immediately obvious whether they're actually more profitable than the other divisions. Economics is full of surprises.
I couldn't care less if 100% of the world's top athletes hailed from Lower Elbonia. So, to answer your question: someone else, I guess.
Cultures are not remembered by the sports heroes they produce. Yet Western society puts a staggering amount of money, importance, and social standing into the sports-industrial complex, and I feel that it is to our detriment. I'd much rather see music, art, and even the STEM disciplines take a more equal share of the BILLIONS plowed into 'sports! sports! sports!'
I just feel that, like cupcakes, sports is a 'sometimes' thing whose consumption has grown way out of proportion to the value it brings us.
Does this punctuation make sense for native english speaking people?
"Athletics cost colleges, students millions"
Does it mean that "Athletics cost colleges" and "students cost millions" ?
Or do every english people find this phrase very clear on first read?
[1] http://www.beyondtheboxscore.com/2008/12/3/678134/the-histor...
A quick example: I'm from France and I'd never have heard from Gonzaga weren't it for John Stockton. That in itself has tremendous value, for big or small universities. It can put you on the map.
Has it benefited them, or you, or anyone else, in any way? I suspect not. Have to be careful about the definition of good. Or the definition of investment.
Although no one will admit to being "that guy", everyone personally is certain that everyone else is "that guy" who makes decisions based on (insert disparaged subject).
There is some minimal level of startup lesson in that actually being useful is unnecessary; only a perception is necessary.
That's not true. In "most" cases, athletics programs do not provide tuition at all, and most student athletes do not receive anything in terms of tuition reimbursement.
In most cases, students are still paying all the tuition and still are required to maintain their academic standings.
Because of this, a good program can attract out of state students, who will generally pay more out of pocket precisely because they are out of state.
Finally, lumping all sports together and claiming they are a waste of money ignores the reality that all sports are not created equal. Sure, adding a football stadium will be expensive, but counting that against the cross-country team is silly.
I'm not against athletics at college. I played rugby in grad school, and it was one of the highlights of my experience. I think athletics are a great thing, but that the growth of football and basketball into quasi-professional programs is tremendously wasteful, morally suspect, and unsustainable.
My point is that the pool of college students nation-wide is not being expanded do to sports. If you're at college (anywhere) and were attracted there as a sports fan, you'd probably still be in college elsewhere if not for the sports, and you'd probably be there for more acadmically valid reasons. You are definitely right that athletics attract out-of-state students, who pay more. But I'd argue that this is actually a bad thing systemically given our national student loan debt crisis.
I love athletics. But I also think that big-money athletics is a cancer on higher ed right now.
How can you have a discussion on athletic spending without mentioning revenue at all!
"Nearly every university loses money on sports. Even after private donations and ticket sales, they fill the gap by tapping students paying tuition or state taxpayers."
Personally, I don't understand this US college sports thing at all.
that should clarify the popularity of US college sports.
You can't justify "student athletes" as having any value to the community other than entertainment, but from a fundraising and marketing perspective they've got some uses.