I will never understand what quality education and sports have in common.
In fact, with the rate of brain-damage suffered by american football players, I suspect sports are actually a detriment to education, not even counting the resources they suck from it.
I've personally seen more 1 generation college attendees in my athletics career circle than not; they're not ignorant jocks trying to skate into the pros, they're trying to better their standing by any means necessary. Most athletes also understand that they "go pro in something other than sports," to steal the NCAA tagline.
Ask your alma mater's department heads, deans and development officers if sports matters. Research (even tech transfer) doesn't raise enough cash to fund our current university system. Tuition doesn't either; and state support (if applicable) doesn't get far either.
Donors provide the rest. The best way to butter up a donor is through university brand prominence. A non Ivy League school can't compete in the same fields as an MIT, Stanford, Cal Tech, etc. You have to increase your university brand through any respectable means necessary. Sports is often that angle.
Go ask your endowed profs if sports matters in any factor to their compensation. It's likely they'll admit that it helps, at minimum.
This is and always has been a terrible argument. Academic scholarships will always be a better use of money. There is no reason those first generation students can't get the attention of schools with academic excellence instead of sports, particularly if they are generally as bright as you claim.
You forget that their home infrastructure if low quality. For example: most low income students that I knew didn't know that the FAFSA was important until it was too late for their freshman year.
Also, they usually had average grades and test scores as well. They just worked hard in college to try to get a good job.
Many still had to take out college loans as well -- athletes aren't all 100% scholarshipped. Most are luck to get books covered. I know this potentially still applies to your argument, but I respectfully feel that your arguments are based on distanced observation alone.
You're ignoring the fact some of the money is only given FOR sports. Plus the prominence sports brings in can help drive donations. I seem to recall the University of Arkansas getting some serious donations recently to fund giving their football head coach a nice raise, so that money could not go anywhere else even if the university wanted to, because it was the condition of the donation.
Yes, but now you have a qualified lead for your endowment fund and also, if you raise money for the coach that frees up an equal amount in your budget for doing whatever the heck you want with. You can't give money exclusively FOR something. This is similar to how when the US requested troops for Iraq from Canada we sent troops to Afghanistan. We couldn't go to Iraq but a Canadian soldier in Afghanistan frees up a US solider to go to Iraq.
Not every lesson or piece of information can be learned from a book or in a classroom. Good luck getting soft skills there.
Real learning occurs while playing sports. Soft skills, discipline, teamwork, personal fitness, and long-time dedication are just a few areas where sports help the whole person.
If real learning occurs while playing sports, then why isn't every student at a university allowed on a sports team? If it's so essential to education, then it should be part of the curriculum.
And are soft skills, discipline, teamwork, and long-term dedication not things that people learn running clubs, competing at quiz bowl, going hiking, hacking software in their free time? Then why is there such disproportionate funding for sports vs all of these other activities?
Having been involved in several clubs and club sports in college, you're treated like shit compared to varsity athletes. I'll be damned if the juggling club could reserve a room in the gym once a week to practice. The Tang Soo Do club had to fight to get enough funding from the college to buy pads and gloves for practicing and sparring with, and that's mostly because it actually brought in money as people outside the college paid to be able to take classes. And yet the football team, which was notorious for losing almost every game it played, had several full-time coaches and staff, its own building and stadium reserved only for their use, got bussed or flown all over the east coast for games and so on. Most other club activities were lucky if they could wrangle a hundred bucks a semester from the college for support.
Not everyone can be on the 12 person, premier D-I basketball team. However, I am unaware of any university that doesn't allow pickup games or club teams by all people.
No one in this entire thread has advocated disproportionate funding for sports. No one. Not once. So that argument is just grasping at something that doesn't exist.
Yes, soft skills + the other skills can be learned with running, quiz bowl, hiking, etc., but not everyone wants to do those things. Why should a swimmer be denied enjoyment because his favorite activity involves physical activity?
I am not denying that clubs get the short end of the straw regarding funding. I was on both sides of the table, playing on large teams and being in small clubs. Once again, no one is advocating this.
This whole thread is about the disproportionate funding that varsity sports get (especially football) compared to other things on campus, such as clubs, club sports, and academics.
You were replying to someone who said that academic scholarships would probably be a better investment than sports scholarships by saying "Not every lesson or piece of information can be learned from a book or in a classroom. Good luck getting soft skills there." That implies to me that you disagree with the comment you're replying to, and think that varsity sports deserve the disproportionate funding that they are getting.
If that was not your intent, I apologize for misconstruing you, but you could be clearer in your comment.
I think that we're actually in agreement here. I think that varsity sports get too much time and attention paid to them; I think that clubs and club sports get less support as a consequence. I don't think that athletics should exist at a college, but I do think that it should be in the same category as any other extra curricular, not some semi-pro thing that drains so many resources at the expense of all other extra-curricular activities.
The money has to come from somewhere. It's the equivalent of state school's MVP. My alma mater, Oklahoma, did the very thing. Their engineering's growing by leaps and bounds, and has had the #1 meteorological research program in the world, and also secured the National Weather Center. CS hasn't grown as aggressively, but it is still growing.
To the downvoter -- universities have to keep their doors open before they can improve. If sports didn't assist with the donations and revenue process in a net positive, they wouldn't spend in their current manner.
While I cannot argue on any point of your post, I distinctly remember that sometime ago on HN there was a post how essentially Stanford and MIT "live" on military grants. The story was about Stanfrod being US-Army stronghold, while the Navy "sponsors" MIT (Just searched: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1416348.)
I have no data, but I think that those DARPA grants are at least substantial, some concrete figures would be nice though.
Of course not. The question is does the amount we spend on athletics (millions) really do anything for academics? No one is saying athletics have no place in university. But why are we spending so much on it, compared to the drama program, debate team, musical ensembles, and school newspaper? When those subjects which tie into academics better than athletics.
> No one is saying athletics have no place in university.
burgerbrain seems to be saying this, which is what I responded to.
> When those subjects which tie into academics better than athletics.
Tie in differently, not better. There are many ways to learn and many lessons to be learned. Drama, debate, music, newspaper, and sports, among others, are all different paths to learn those lessons.
I am not justifying the large amounts of money spent on sports programs. What I am saying is that sports do educate people and provide an important opportunity for students in many ways. Saying "nothing is learned while playing sports" is false.
"> No one is saying athletics have no place in university.
burgerbrain seems to be saying this"
Absolutely incorrect. I merely believe they should not receive disproportionate funding, compared to other non-academic clubs; and assert that like other non-academic clubs, they should play absolutely no role in acceptance.
"Tie in differently, not better"
BULLSHIT. Journalism (newspaper club) is a respected academic study. Tackling dudes on a lawn over a ball is not. Drama, debate, and music are similarly intellectual endeavours, not sports.
"What I am saying is that sports do educate people"
Spoken like a true meathead. Even if they did educate, which is a laughable claim, they have no place in the curriculum of universities.
In college I took a course called "Physics of Alpine Skiing." A manufacturing engineering professor taught the course. He was a big ski racer in his younger days. While searching for a college major, and generally just drifting along, a mentor at his school explained to him that skiing is machining. This got the professor interested in manufacturing engineering. The professor ended up having a successful collegiate ski race career AND an inspired academic career. College graduate became PhD graduate and eventually a tenured full professor at a major engineering research university.
The professor's interest in skiing gave him direction for his life's work. Professor performs manufacturing and machining research, using his intuition and experience from the slopes and applies it in his labs.
This professor is a campus favorite, inspiring many in his courses, and often advises senior design projects that deal with winter sports technologies, which gives those students skills that are valuable in the workplace.
Without a ski race program this person would not have even been in college. He would have been skiing and skiing only. The US would not have had a competent manufacturing researcher and professor.
This seems to show benefit from sports programs. No?
Learning how to organize a team of people with varying skills and abilities to come together, set a plan, execute on it repeatedly, and then repeat that day in and day out over 4 years through countless types of adversity and unexpected events while living in close quarters and changing as people over time has no value on the job.
And even if they paid more back thant the university invested, it still has not to do anything with education. It is then just a part-time money making scheme to keep the university alive. Since such investments into the sports business do not have anything to do with the core business of the university, education, they could they could easily invest into other kinds of non-educational but profitable businesses like, for example, porn. It then also means that universities can obviously not survive financially just by doing their core business, i.e. by offering educational and research services and _have_ to invest into more profitable but completely non-intellectual endeavours.
Bzz, wrong. Education is a college's job. A university's core business is research. Education is just a part-time money making scheme to keep the university alive.
You are oversimplifying the educational system to a very large degree (pun intended).
Education isn't about the 'information', it's about the collective sum of benefits that a university provides. If it were strictly about the education (courses, books, etc.) there would be no purpose -- most of it can be found for free online.
University is about the whole package, of which a strong alumni network is often a major piece. Without a strong sports program, many of these schools would lose a large fraction of their alumni's attention - and I don't mean dollars and cents. To use a previous commenter:
Ding ding ding. I went to a D3 school for football, and when considering a possible MBA, something I was looking at half jokingly, but half legitimately, was whether the school was large - because I thought it would make watching sports on TV for the rest of my life, and having true attachment, a lot more fun.
Undoubtedly, as I progress further in my career, that fervor would have grown with team success, and also made my attachment more real - while my current alma mater (Chapman University in Southern California) - would have fallen away from consciousness with no legitimate way to grab my attention.
Whether I make a donation to any school in the future is up for debate, and I am now not likely to get an MBA based on many of the points raised here and elsewhere - but the point made on this comment hits the nail on the head.
I find it extremely unlikely that I will ever donate to my small private school in Southern California - because the thoughts of how it's helped me depart with every passing second, and they have no way to get it back.
This obviously leads to a weakening of the school on a whole, in terms of future enrollment and overall reputation, leading to a decline in the quality of education.
More than they were by homework sets. Academic research certainly played a role in winning the second world war. I'd say that quality leadership played an even bigger role. Cadets and Midshipmen at our service academies have always been required to participate in athletics because team sports develop leadership, teamwork, and tactical and strategic thinking (in the '30s through the '60s, the service academies were powerhouses in college football). Academy graduates were a minority of overall officers in the war, but were a majority of the most senior officers. Prior to the war, the cadre of war college students and faculty who developed the tactics and strategies which won the war were also predominantly academy graduates.
As far as 26 July '45, the Japanese refused to surrender. The guys that forced Japan in to submission were Little Boy and Fat Man and they had an academic background.
The only leadership required from the 'sport trained' generals was choosing which city had the most juicy civilians.
The "only" leadership required to use Little Boy and Fat Man was fighting our way across the world's biggest ocean to get into range to use them. To accomplish the same task, academics would have needed another couple of decades (and a boat-load of stolen German scientists) to invent the ICBM.
Nukes certainly ended the war earlier, and I believe they saved tens if not hundreds of thousands of lives on both sides, but they didn't create victory. Victory was already a foregone conclusion by the time we used them--they just accelerated it and lowered the cost dramatically.
One of the big reasons Universities compete in sports is to attract alumni donors. If you just look at it at a micro level, the direct expense on sports is probably more than the revenue from sports. But if you factor in alumni donations, then I've heard that the benefits far outweigh the costs.
I was in a Division II school, and they made a big push to get into Division I. And the main reason they gave was to get alumni involvement in the school.
The article address this fallacy. More often than not, those alumni donors are giving money to the athletic booster programs, not the school's academic programs. As a result, everyone who attends the university and pays tuition pays for the athletic program, even though only a small percentage actually play sports.
Ding ding ding. I went to a D3 school for football, and when considering a possible MBA, something I was looking at half jokingly, but half legitimately, was whether the school was large - because I thought it would make watching sports on TV for the rest of my life, and having true attachment, a lot more fun.
Undoubtedly, as I progress further in my career, that fervor would have grown with team success, and also made my attachment more real - while my current alma mater (Chapman University in Southern California) - would have fallen away from consciousness with no legitimate way to grab my attention.
Whether I make a donation to any school in the future is up for debate, and I am now not likely to get an MBA based on many of the points raised here and elsewhere - but the point made on this comment hits the nail on the head.
I find it extremely unlikely that I will ever donate to my small private school in Southern California - because the thoughts of how it's helped me depart with every passing second, and they have no way to get it back.
As much as I love TMQB, and I do agree about the excesses in administration levels at both college and pro ranks (I believe his post superbowl column dealt with the extravagance of pro front offices, in terms of the labor talks). There are obvious biases to his work :
Some coaches' salaries are covered by booster funds, not by the school itself: but booster funds funnel money that otherwise might have been donated to a school's academic programs
This is simply untrue for most major sports universities. Boosters by and large donate to the school for sports, primarily, and then to education, secondarily.
Phil Knight's largesses to the University of Oregon help both athletic and scholarly activities, but when the rumor that he gets to call one play a game [1] indicate the real reason for his contributions. Robert Burton's several million dollar donation to UCONN was primarily focused on its athletics [2] and his lack of approval in their hiring of Paul Pasqualoni resulted in his desire to have his $3million donation refunded.
Rich people aren't bragging to their friends about the SAT scores of their schools, but are bragging when their team beats your team.
Theses statistics come up several times a year, and they are always misleading. It's Hard to measure how much money a University makes on sports teams. I go to a school that has a BCS football program that makes more money then it spends (objectively, spent ~18 million last year and made ~23 million). I don't know about the athletic program at large. But beyond that $23M in revenue directly from the football program, there are some other revenue sources that are hard to measure.
Schools like UT make a whole lot of their money off of alumni donating directly to the program. When UT lost their head coach, on of the alumni flew in several potential candidates for the position on his private jet. How do you measure that in revenue?
Further, I would not have gone to the school I chose if it weren't for the football program. Season tickets, even in the nosebleeds, for a team that has won its conference more often then not in the past 5 years, has way more value to me then the ~$300 that I pay. That definitely reflected in my decision to go here, and I probably would have gone somewhere else otherwise. So we can claim at least ~$30k per year to my school for their athletic program.
Also, depending on what they include in the athletic program, it can be even more involved. Would you have gone to a school with no intramural programs? What about if they had no gym? Maybe a lot of people would have, but the majority would not.
If it made 5 million that year it is one of the few that made money. And besides, I doubt the school would have made money if only profitable teams were allowed to play in the division, so its still a net loss.
And that plane trip shouldn't be considered profit. The lack of a major sports team would have meant the lack of a free plane trip, but it would also have meant the lack of a need for a plane trip.
And I highly doubt your school's net profit is 30k per student per year.
Yeah, the plane trip wasn't meant as an example of where schools make extra money, just an example of how donors contribute that may or may not show up in the revenue. If they donated their private jet, they also donated a fair bit of cash, which I'm not sure if it shows up in revenue.
Also, the ~$5M profit wasn't meant to be presented as the standard, just to give context as to where my comment was coming from. It was meant as "I don't need to rationalize my school's waste of money, and I might be in a minority of schools that do make a profit". My school sinks a lot of money into a not very good (but getting better) basketball program, so it wouldn't surprise me if we were a net loss for athletics.
Profit per student is also a tricky thing. Most professors are a sunk cost (tenure), so while the profit per student is less then $30k per year, the marginal profit per student is ~$30k. But ignoring that, they have to be making at least some profit off of me and other students that would not have gone here if it weren't for the football program. It wouldn't be $30k per person, but it also wouldn't be 0.
My comment wasn't meant to disprove the statistic, as it wouldn't surprise me if a significant portion of schools lose on their athletic program, but to argue that it might be less then they asserted.
Did anyone actually read the article and his source?!? The article's author, Gregg Easterbrook, appears to have misread the NCAA report that supports his main thesis.
Here is the key statement from Easterbrook's article: "Recently the NCAA reported that only 14 Division I-A programs clear a profit, while no college or university in the United States has an athletic department that is financially self-sustaining. Nobody in Division I -- not Alabama, not Auburn, not Oklahoma, nobody -- has an athletic department that pays its own way. "
Apparently, he got that statement from the page 8 of the report, where there is a summary of findings. Here is the statement: "A total of 14 athletics programs in the FBS reported positive net revenues for the 2009 fiscal year, which represents a decrease from the 25 reported in 2008. The gap between the “profitable” programs and the remainder continued to grow, however a bit more slowly.
(3.5)"
Anyone notice the mistake he made?
Revenue is the _input_ side of the ledger.
Profit is the revenue minus expenses.
The claim in the NCAA report is that only 14 schools had a net increase in revenue (year over year).
It does not claim that only 14 schools were profitable!!!
This can be further confirmed by using the NCAA's own financial database:
Univ of Mich had a net profit of $17mil
Univ of Texas had a net profit of $7mil
Auburn Uni. had a new profit of $121k
Univ of Alabama (Roll Tide) reported a neglible loss for 2010, but I suspect this is an anamoly (big capital improvement plans just completed--new stadium expansion etc.)
Note where most of the profit comes from: football! Also note that typically the men's programs (football and basketball) make huge profits which cover the losses for women's and other programs.
This is a weekly football column, most of which is about the topic in question, when you get to the words "Brett Favre" you can stop reading. Do follow the links, though, the USA Today one is especially damning.
So why are student clubs being giving an effectively unlimited budget out of proportion with the number of members?
At all the universities in my country, student clubs (whether they are about sport, non-sport competitive activities, interests and hobbies, or even 'drinking clubs') get paid by the student association (which has a finite budget to provide services to students) based on the number of students in the club. Student sports clubs are unlikely to be able to afford any full-time staff - but that isn't really necessary when there are plenty of club members willing to volunteer.
I have to wonder how any university could not have at least some limits on how much university money clubs could spend per member.
There clearly seems to be an agenda with this post (and certainly in some of the comments). My question is, why would you make THIS your agenda?
Clearly there is a benefit to Universities having athletics. As other commenters have stated, this mostly shows itself in alumni donations, alumni engagement, and alumni pride.
Other reason probably have to do with the fact that when recruiting 18 year old kids to pursue a 4 year course of study it may be helpful to select individuals that have show the ability to focus on something to a level of success. It takes a lot of effort to be a collegiate level athlete in anything. My guess is that this generally and consistently translates to the ability to succeed in academics and life in general. When your 18 you may not have had a whole lot of chances to apply your self to anything. Just something gets you halfway there.
At least 6 US presidents have played athletics for a university.(random tidbit)
I didn't play. I received an academic scholarship for making an awesome grade on a standardized test that I paid a bunch of money to prep for. Yeah me. At the time I thought they gave it to me because I did awesome on the test. 15 years later I look back realize that it was the fact that I did the focused work to succeed that they were more interested in.
Beyond the actual contribution of athletics to the University ecosystem, why do we have to live in a world that is so small that we have to make a decision one way or another? Who peed in your cheerios? Who is hurt by college athletics? Certainly there are some issues around Football Concussions at the moment, but that is addressable outside of 'Lets get rid of sports because you don't have to study'.
That's just appalling. In Europe, AFAIK there is usually no such thing as college/university sports--competition-wise, that is (aside of the known the Oxford/Cambridge rowing competition.)
Why are UC-Berkeley and UCLA head coaches earning more than 8 times as much as Christos Papadimitriou? Granted his salary is stellar by comparison, but there are a couple of other well-known UC professors who earn much less. (Richard Karp [of Rabin-Karp fame and Turing-Award winner] gets 166k [14 times less than the UC-Berkeley head-coach].) In addition, the professors from the med-schools seem to do a lot better; even though they are quite out of proportion, at least they're saving lives.
Previously, I supposed these were profitable investments, but when one head coach salaries buys you 14 Dick Karps or 8 Christos Papadimitrious, I really think it doesn't make any sense at all...
In Europe, they do do it differently. Players turn professional at 16-18 depending on the sport and then ride the bench until their mid-20s unless they are truly prodigies. Pro teams are responsible for developing talent and have feeder clubs that field toddlers; they also support B/C/D/E-level leagues which play on town/village level.
What's happening in the US is that the educational system is subsidizing player development and regional promotion for the big pro leagues--which are such a big business it's not even funny.
"The High School Football Team" is an incredibly common movie and TV stereotype, that has no equivalent whatsoever over here, and until recently I never really thought about how completely different the situations are.
How did this happen? Why did junior sports become attached to high schools and colleges in the US when there's nothing like it in Europe?
In scotland rugby developed this way, so that now the "FP" (i.e. school) teams feature promininently in the top two tiers: GHA, Boroughmuir, Watsonians, Heriots, Dundee High, Edinburgh Academicals, Aberdeen Grammar, Stewart's Melville are all such teams.
School\Uni rugby (universities compete in a separate competition) is the closest equivalent we have, though it's utterly unable to compete in terms of attendance and money :)
> Why are UC-Berkeley and UCLA head coaches earning more than 8 times as much as Christos Papadimitriou?
Because there are donors willing to pay the salaries of those coaches and there aren't donors willing to pay Papadimitriou more money. And, you can actually take money from big-money athletics and pay for acadmics.
You can argue that this shouldn't be all you like, but it is. The money that goes to those coaches can't be spent on CS. If anything, it actually provides more money for CS.
I've listened to John Hennessey, Stanford's president, walk through all this. He thinks that Stanford's athletic program makes money for its academic program.
If you think that he's wrong, please provide details so I can ask him. (And it better be something that isn't currently in this thread, as he went through the equivalent and more.)
In the UK there's the British Universities competition (used to be BUSA in my day, now it's BUCS - http://www.bucs.org.uk).
It can in no way compete with US college football in terms of attendance or revenue. However there is no revenue to speak of, teams are funded by each Uni's sports union and by the players themselves. And all the money goes towards paying for facilities, transportation and maybe new strips every other year.
All the same it exists, it's well organised and has many thousands of participants in lots of sports each wednesday afternoon.
allows drilling down to a comparison of similar colleges to any college you care to name, and looking at a Finance and Faculty tab to see the spending per student at the college.
Colleges are only partially there for academics. All in all they exist to prepare you for "the real world" and to be a productive part of society. Certainly you can go to college and not socialize and not watch/play any sports and focus only on preparing for your career in academia. That's a choice. However, most people gain a lot more out of their college experience outside of the classroom. I was a student-athlete in the ACC and I certainly gained a lot more preparation for life after school from my experience as an athlete than as a student. To say sports aren't important in college is simply naive. As a matter of fact, to the poster that said "that doesn't mean kegs are good for education" I'll play devil's advocate and say that there is a ton of education that comes out of socializing and partying. It helps you become a lot more comfortable in social settings. In turn this helps you in other facets of your future career.
tldr; IMO, out-of-class activities during college are just as important if not more important than the in class education.
Oklahoma pays it's own way. In fact, it gives nearly $1 MM to the general scholarship fund annually.
Of course, the only citation I can offer is being a former student athlete, and having my support staff, coaches, and university executives repeat the statistic on the record like, well, a broken record. I haven't seen the line items though myself -- I wasn't on the student liaison committee.
look guys, when nearly every single player in a mature market is doing the same thing, its a good bet that what they're doing is good for business. instead of screaming about it, maybe we should try to understand.
public schools do not exist in a market. what private schools do is their business, the issue here is that they are spending your money on what amounts to a hole in the ground benefits wise.
What about merchandise sales? I doubt those directly show up on the athletic department balance sheets, but every time a Alabama hoodie is sold, that is almost entirely because of athletics. I strongly doubt that in reality most of these departments are operating in anything resembling the red.
It's advertising. I bet most University research programmes don't make money either. But they do move undergrad degrees, and endowments. Harvard does not have a rowing team for the benefit of the Winkelvoss twins, it has a rowing team because that is the kind of thing that their parents and other alumni expect.
In fact, with the rate of brain-damage suffered by american football players, I suspect sports are actually a detriment to education, not even counting the resources they suck from it.
EDIT: Another case against college sports, and sports scholarships: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/26/drexel-basketball-r...