U.N.C. Investigation Reveals ‘Shadow Curriculum’ to Help Athletes
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They are adults. If, as adults, they choose not to pursue academic studies, and instead choose to focus all of their energy on sports, then they should be allowed to do that without putting their sports career at risk.
I do blame everyone involved in the fakeness, though. Their decisions should stand on their own.
This is especially true when they're turning in BS papers for crap degrees that can't and won't serve them once they leave school. A minuscule few make it pro. The rest - if they graduate, even - have only an AFAM degree to show for it and no real life skills.
I agree that if they want to be athletes, they should be allowed to be athletes. But they should be paid appropriately for it in kind.
I'm tired of seeing this argument without data. If you sit down and think about the numbers, you'll see that for the vast majority of NCAA athletes, this is false. Most get a very sweet deal relative to their market value if the NCAA did not exist.
First, limit to the NCAA sports that actually produce revenue, essentially men's football and basketball. If the NCAA did not exist, these players would at best be in a minor league (again except for the top dozen or two in the country). Now look at a sport that has a minor league in America: baseball. Minor league baseball players, even toward the top, make how much? $2000-3000 per month. And that's only in-season.
Paid tuition is already worth higher in cash value than that. And the value of the student-athlete experience? You can't put a price tag on it. Ask any former NCAA athlete what they would trade to give up their experience.
But, you respond, NCAA sports make way more money than baseball minor leagues. Yes, that's true. But it's not solely because of the players. It's because of the schools. Schools bring almost everything important to the table: A huge fanbase, a connection to a physical location and community, an illusion of amateur-ness, rivalries, all of these things you can't get to nearly that extent outside the NCAA.
The players? They have no bargaining power because without the NCAA system, they'd be hosed. They'd be working even harder for essentially less money, living a tougher lifestyle, and not even get the degree to show for it. Hard to argue they should be paid when they bring very little to the table compared to the schools.
The point people miss is that it's the combination of the schools and the players together that generates so much revenue. Either without the other would be out of luck. And right now, if you think about the numbers, the current split is pretty fair. The exception might be the few star players who could make millions in the pros.
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I want to say, I'm not saying that players aren't exploited currently. I think they are. But I think the exploitation boils down to your second paragraph: They lose a real education because they don't have their priorities in line at that point in their lives.
But the solution isn't to pay kids even more money/benefits to continue to masquerade as students while living as full-time athletes. The solution should be to divorce sports from education and create minor leagues. This will never happen because, as I stated above, it's the combination of schools and sports that generates so much money, and the people at the top won't give that up just to do the right thing.
In fact, I agree with the latter part of your comment, where you say that divorcing sports and education is the long overdue solution to this problem. I personally don't believe playing sports (sports management is another thing) has anything to do with higher education. But, I also agree that it will probably never change. There's too much money at the top, and it's too easy to screw the athletes down at the bottom.
For the players. this form of amateurism means they have no power to negotiate contracts to offset the risks associated with the sport.
Doesn't make it right, I;m just saying the argument could be made.
This is true for only a very small percentage of college athletes.
Most college sports don't generate a lot of money for their schools. Even the most popular sports, men's football and men's basketball, generate big money for a minority of elite programs.
Most student athletes are students first, not looking for an opening in a professional league.
However, the athletes are only able to actualize this compensation if they can freely choose their majors, are able to take the classes they want, and actually earn their education. By creating a secondary tier of classes, the school was deliberately exploiting them.
I think that the value of a degree (for an athlete) will vary greatly depending on the school. Some schools are more academically rigorous for athletes than others... UNC apparently was on the low end of the scale.
Compare and contrast with the money an 18-21 year old second team player at Real Madrid or Barcelona makes and get back to me on the "significant value". Especially when the athletes are being funneled through second-rate degrees to free up their time for sport.
Having said that, I agree with you on the whole. They are being paid in kind: in room and board that they could get at home, and in tuition that doesn't seem to amount to much. I think that baseball's structure of minor leagues and Canadian hockey's junior hockey offer a better deal to the young athlete.
I do think that most public colleges should get out of the business of fielding sports teams. Except for the best schools, they will not be a net positive financially.
The actual number comes down to around $25,000/year for public schools and $35,000/year for private schools. This is out-of-state tuition combined with living expenses and school supplies. However, it goes down significantly once the student establishes in-state residency.
So basically, these college athletes are making working class wages while learning nothing of significant value. A few of them get into the major leagues upon graduation and the rest struggle with unemployment and underemployment for years. Being involved in college athletics costs them more in the long run than the paltry sum of expenses they get to waive over their college career.
Here's an article about the latest NCAA reform vote on [edit: student-]athlete compensation: http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/08/06/us-ncaa-rules-idUS...
It turns out that people want to watch their school beat another school, and they aren't particular about the athletes. You can say the individuals bring value, but they destroy an equal amount of value at some other school when they succeed.
Witness the last NBA lockout when the players had some all-star games and couldn't fill the seats. A mature competitive league is responsible for far more of the revenue than it gets credit for.
Because they are not semi-pro athletes. They are university students first and amateur athletes second. Or at least that's what's being claimed. And as students, they have to pass the same general education curriculum as every other student in the university, and to the same standards.
> If, as adults, they choose not to pursue academic studies, and instead choose to focus all of their energy on sports, then they should be allowed to do that without putting their sports career at risk.
Sure. But this should be done outside of a university environment. The problem is not that athletes expected to be good students. The problem is that in the US they are expected to be students at all.
Because there are semi-pro teams and university teams, and the two things are not the same thing.
> If, as adults, they choose not to pursue academic studies, and instead choose to focus all of their energy on sports, then they should be allowed to do that without putting their sports career at risk.
Sure, and if they choose to do that, they should do it somewhere other than an academic institution.
FWIW, I have heard of the NBA showing interest in kids in high school. I am not sure if they actually recruited any of them, though.
Both the league and player's union benefit from this restriction in trade. Appellate courts have ruled in their favor. So, the NFL as zero interest in creating a farm system that competes with the NCAA. Obviously, the NCAA also likes this arrangement as it's a major source of revenue for college athletic departments.
So you'd argue that football is an intellectual pursuit in the same sense that math, physics, philosophy, or history is?
That study of the nuts and bolts of the game is worthy of the attention of our finest minds (as a discipline unto itself)?
The "reading books and writing papers" you mention is a severe and tragic distortion of why universities exist. It has little to do with the academic activity that's occurring outside the undergraduate classrooms.
It might be the case that there is a lot of waste happening in universities due to the commodification of education, but that doesn't trivialize the serious work that's still happening, however underfunded it remains.
As to math I would argue it's more meaningful than say topology, but less than other branches.
EX: Fusion research is potentially extremely useful, but so far it's impact is basically nothing. Ditto Astrophysics.
Though, if you have anything specific in mind I would love to hear about it as I am really drawing a blank.
Semi conductor design by comparison is something few people directly care about but it directly impacts their lives increasing it's value immensely.
PS: History for example is important, but the study of history has fairly limited impact outside of entertainment for most people.
Not sure this is the case. Pew pegs the percentage of Americans who read a book last year at 77% [http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/the-decl...], and the Super Bowl drew 111 million viewers [http://www.cbsnews.com/news/super-bowl-2014-ratings-set-new-...]. I'd guess the number of people who watched a football game but not the Super Bowl last year isn't totally insignificant, but probably not huge (and I'm skeptical that the ratings aren't maybe a little inflated).
Further, football goes beyond the supper bowl and beyond the NFL. Including collage, high school etc, and an estimated 200+ million people watched at least one football game last year.
The question wasn't whether it was actively enjoyed by a large number of people, but whether it was "an academic activity".
The idea that was is an "academic activity" is defined by how widely enjoyed the activity is probably only defensible with a very unusual definition of "academic".
"Game theory" is clearly an academic activity. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory
The study of football at a deeper level is a subset of that, but it covers a fairly wide area. From which plays to call in offence vs defense. Cost benefit of risking a player injury in a low win percentage game. Which players to sign etc. (Or even just the math around fantasy football.)
I mean just because your covering a specific WWI battle does not mean your doing something else and not studding history.
Change the terms in your post and theirs a bit, and I can't tell if we are talking about exploiting footballers or participants in the YCombinator program.
And do you suppose that people are just born being really good at sports? Of course not, it takes thousands of hours of learning/education. If we're going to treat things like math and economics as academic subjects, then I don't see how football is any different.
Ignoring the NCAA route in favor of anything else at this point isn't just career suicide, it's career abortion.
Yes, there are.
True, they aren't a good way to get into the NFL, because the NFL prefer to recruit from college teams.
But the question then shouldn't be "why are college athletes expected to meet the academic sstandards that go with being in college" but "why do major professional sports teams in certain sports prefer to recruit from colleges rather than lesser professional leagues in the same sport"?
And great, that's a completely different argument. One that I think we really should be having soon, though I'm not sure if anything will be changed.
Looking at the lowest level of college football, there are only 11 active roster NFL players from a D3 school. [0]
There are 1,696 active NFL players, that's a 0.6 percent chance of 'making it', at the lowest level of the game.
Again, absolute and utter career suicide because of some moral grievance.
Because the institution of a university exists to provide an academic education that will help them function in the world after school. Because offering a degree in Football would be more predatory than most for-profit colleges Audio Engineer courses.
There is a straightforward economic incentive (money) for both the school and the athletes to practice more and win more, and it plainly has nothing to do with academics, whatever the grand rhetoric about student athletes. As with all such situations, when there is a barrier to economic success, the system will gradually evolve to short circuit those barriers (cheating) as much as is possible within the confines of the rules. This is well documented by now. I have to imagine that UNC was just unlucky enough to get caught.
I will say that I'm not really sure who values this certification though.
A 2.0 is not a decent grade nor GPA, it means you're failing at most of your classes and will probably be expelled.
Btw, your argument is "leave the school and pursue sports." I just found that interesting, that's all.
The NFL has college football as their feeder program.
There are a lot of tradeoffs, but in the end I think the MLB's system is better. To me, the charade of "student athletes" in football gets more and more strained each year.
The question is if they did want to transition to a minor league football system, how can you go from here to there in an orderly fashion?
The player's union would clearly have something to say about it, particularly if they can easily bring players up and down mid-season based on injuries or performance.
Even then, I am a bit surprised. I remember athlete friends being super concerned about their attendance and passing. In almost every class, we'd get someone drop by while class was in session to check if the athletes in the class were in actually there.
Your university almost certainly had similar classes that were very easy and required very little attendance...and were always full of athletes and lazy seniors looking to pump up their GPA.
You can't fault the students (athletes or otherwise) for finding a shortcut in the system and then exploiting it. It is the university's responsibility to quality control its curriculum.
I think they should be on a college team.
I think they should be going to college.
I do not think they should be paid.
Like most people, they are preparing for their future in the field of their interest.
The issue, in my opinion, is that we attempt to shoehorn them into "traditional" curriculum. They're forced to choose a major, often funneled into the easiest thing just to get through.
Fundamentally, the majority are in college to learn and prepare for life as a professional athlete (assuming we're talking about the "Big 3" sports). Let's allow them to do that. Let's provide programs that focus on that, that teach sport fundamentals, dealing with the media, managing money, dealing with agents, fundamentals of business, etc. Let's also provide routes for post-professional-sport life, like lower-level media classes, etc.
We seem to have an aversion to treating a lucrative and very real profession like something that warrants education.
Edit: The problem with $ and athletes largely applies solely to football, wherein the NCAA and NFL have colluded to force high school talent to play somewhere for three years after graduation. This is arbitrary and stupid, and forces kids into programs they don't care about, for institutions that they don't care about. This is the primary issue with not paying players. It's not that colleges don't pay, it's that there's no other opportunity to get paid.
As mentioned, the curriculum would also include tangentially related fields.
Caltech was fact was technically in violation, because it allows students to spend the first three weeks of each term taking classes without registering for them. The idea is that students can sample several classes they are interested in, then decide which they will stick with, and then register. For this three weeks, they are doing the work from all of the classes they are sampling.
However, since they are not registered for a full academic load during that three weeks, they count as part-time students, not full-time students, and so are ineligible for NCAA sports. Caltech's new director of athletics noticed this, stopped the violations, and reported his department to the NCAA.
The reaction of the press, both general and sports (Google "NCAA caltech" for details), was generally to make fun of the NCAA, and point out all the serious athletic schools routinely committing much worse, much more intentional violations.
Of course, some of the major sanctions won't have any effect. For instance, Caltech was banned from postseason play for one year. Considering that most Caltech teams are in the midst of years or even decades long losing streaks in conference play, they aren't going near the postseason anyway. They also banned off-campus recruiting...which Caltech doesn't do.
The only sanction that might have actually been noticeable was wiping out all wins of the ineligible teams. There was some initial concern that this would wipe out the basketball win over Occidental earlier that year that had snapped a 26 year, 310 conference game losing streak [1]. It turned out all the players on that team had been eligible, so the win stands.
[1] A movie was made about this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Hoops
That's bloody ridiculous. Add-drop period is practiced at almost all real universities.
It's possible to be a scholarship athlete and get a real academic degree. I've seen people do it first hand. But it's hard -- you need to start with a decent academic background, and then work your ass off and most likely the social aspect of your college time will suffer.
That being said, even without the best academic background its possible to legitimately graduate if there is institutional support for it. The student might not have the most rigorous undergraduate course work, but they will have earned a degree equivalent to many non-athletes at the school. But for this to happen there needs to be institutional support both inside and outside the athletic department.
What's disturbing to me about UNC, is not just that they knowingly and persistently cheated, but that there behavior was purely and most basely exploitative -- they weren't even pretending to educate these students.
I would imagine at many or most big sports schools, it is the latter.
Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if it's the latter at UNC too. If so, UNC has done a world-class cover up so far by making it look like the former.
You don't really know what happened, but the eventual conclusion that most would take is:
1. he got a passing grade in spite of irregular class attendance. This is highly unlikely, but always seems to be the first place people go because "athletes get treated differently."
or
2. he got a late drop - which some consider "unfair," even in the light of late drops being available to any student for a whole host of reasons (For example, I dropped an entire semester due to depression, well after the drop date)
I'm curious to understand why this system isn't practiced in the US.
Things are much different now many of the clubs in MLS, NASL, and USL have their own academies where the players are coached by professional coaches or pro players at starting very young ages. One local example is: http://www.capitalarearailhawks.com/
The model is much different, though. Generally the goal with most of these academies is to make a college team.
Yes, they can get drunk and get laid for a couple years, and if they're really good they might not have to borrow too much money for the privilege. But what a complete waste of time for everyone involved. They take pointless courses for worthless degrees so the student body can burn cars when balls are thrown correctly.
Europeans have the right approach to education, even if they're still too credential-obsessed. Nobody cares about college sports, nobody goes into debt pursuing their degrees, and everyone can enter the work force much younger and start earning a few extra years of salary.
That said, football & basketball are completely out of hand, not to mention the playoff/BCS/NCAA Tournament system, TV/media rights, and the insanity of one-and-done feeder systems into the NBA (I'm looking at you, Kentucky!). Those athletes should be paid and they should potentially be employed by the colleges as athletes completely separately from any academic matriculation.
The ostensible point of university is to develop a student's mind to solve problems -- preferably in the real world, though humanities programs insist that paying $50k+/year to read poetry is just as valuable an investment. Even if you take that assertion at face value, I'm not sure anyone, anywhere pretends that playing basketball prepares the student-athlete for anything at all. Almost none of them have a chance at a professional sports contract. Most will graduate with useless majors, having squandered their youth and their health on pointless competitions to throw a ball in a hoop. It's STUPID. Everyone involved is wasting their time.
I'm all for athletics in colleges. I played intramural sports and enjoyed it, because nobody pretended that it mattered. But I really don't see a compelling case for the subsidy of organized college sports... which, like someone pointed out, is really just a a subsidy for professional organizations.
And it's not just the pointless waste of time and money in college sports. The argument for college as an institution is getting weaker and weaker as free online alternatives get better and better. Aside from getting drunk and cheering against UMichigan, what compelling features does Ohio State University offer versus Harvard's courses on edX?
But I agree with you about lambda calculus. Let's definitely keep higher education for STEM fields, where rigorous and difficult subjects would benefit from such educations. At the same time, let's be real. Most university students today are wasting their time getting worthless degrees, for no reason but that credential inflation has turned BAs/BSs into high school diplomas.
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Schools can technically do whatever they want, but in practice this would put them in violation of agreements with the NCAA, they'd get kicked out, and then they'd have nobody to play against.