Sounds like that's a problem for the pro sports leagues to solve. They have the money to do it, so they'll be fine.
Baseball does an adequate job with its system of minor league teams. Pretty much every other country in the world manages to have professional sports leagues without having universities be their feeder teams.
Even in your scenario, there's nothing stopping the aspiring golfer from attending Stanford part-time while they try to make it in pro-golf. Or applying and deferring admission for a couple of years. Frankly, they'd do better academically if they didn't have golf distracting them.
baseball arguably does a terrible job at solving this.
the minor league system pays significantly less than poverty wages. incentivizing kids to go that route instead of getting an education is terrible.
which is why so many dont, and go to college on scholarships anyway, which leads us right back where we started.
the right analogy to make IMO is ice hockey, especially the canadian model. There, you have well funded and professional-like "minor leagues" (called juniors close to same thing). you can't get paid but in the tier 1 leagues you have very little if not zero personal living expenses, it's like being on a full-ride at a big college program with room and board included. In canada, it's seen as the route potential NHLers take instead of continuing with school. you're not allowed to be paid, but there's a rule in place that for every year you play in that league you're owed one full year of college paid for. If you age out of the league and dont make it as a pro, you at least get 2-4 years of free college to go get the rest of your life together as compensation.
The US Junior system has some of those attributes but is more geared towards getting kids into NCAA scholarships. The thing there though, IMO, is that the money involve in that sport is right about at that sweet spot where i'd argue a full ride to school like notre dame or penn state is about right for the level of compensation owed.
all opinions above are my own, in the context of a former D1 ice hockey athlete who thinks the football players should probably be paid.
The Canadian Major Juniors are a great model. Of course, there also players who try out at MJ camps with their names obscured as not to jeopardize their NCAA eligibility.
Baseball's history of labor abuse ( read up on the history of free agency ) is why the Minors are a terrible mechanism.
minimum wage is minimum wage (IMO?), the business losing money only dictates how long that position will exist for, not change the compensation owed for performing employed work.
in minor league baseball, who's indepent teams may be anywhere on the spectrum of losing or making money but who are also affiliated with parent organizations that make hundreds of millions, there is a plethora of literature lately that accuses them of paying significantly less than US minimum wage. In many cases it appears the players pay them for the right to play when it's all done.
in the college hockey example i referred to, the D1 teams/leagues usually have decent revenue from tickets and tv deals but it's not a ton and i'd take a shot in the dark that most programs are pretty much breaking even after scholarships, staff, and facilities are accounted for. In that environment, having an athlete get "paid" maybe a $40k/year total package in scholarship, room and board, playing equipment and facilities use, and cash per diems on road trips is both above minimum wage and probably no more than they could reasonably expect if the league was "pro" and had nothing to do with college.
> Even in your scenario, there's nothing stopping the aspiring golfer from attending Stanford part-time while they try to make it in pro-golf.
Does Stanford allow part time undergraduates? A brief Googling suggests that generally they do not, unless there are special circumstances, but it wasn't clear what would count as special circumstances.
NBA? Sure. NFL? Yeah. They can probably fund and figure out the logistics for an operation like this.
What about all the other sports? At the moment, we've figured out a way to elevate less lucrative sports like track & field or swimming into a potential profession without making young people take massive risks by skipping higher education.
> Most people who want to do away with college sports seem okay with killing their professional leagues.
Not at all. I just believe professional leagues will be fine with or without near-professional-quality college teams. There's far too much money in professional sports for them to die out just because universities don't field teams. I refer you to European soccer leagues for an alternative model.
Moreover de-facto professional athletes playing for a pittance and getting a poor education on top of that makes my blood boil. Pay them proper wages and don't screw up their education. College football and basketball teams also have a tendency to suck up resources and attention away from the actual purpose of a university - which is to perform research and educate people.
It's exhausting to have to remind people in this thread that I'm talking about way more than the money maker sports.
There's not "far too much money" in professional swimming or track & field. Killing the college sports, subsidized by the money maker sports, may very well kill the professional leagues for many sports.
D1 basketball athletes be able to be paid. Absolutely. That doesn't change my opinion that college sports benefit society and are often worth the extra cost.
If professional swimming or track "benefits society", why doesn't the government fund it directly? That's how it works in most other countries. Why are universities shouldering that burden?
Sports are important. Being competitive is important. Having hobbies is important. Taking time to do something other than "real life" responsibilities is important.
Much of this relies on the inspiration people get from watching these sports, and exposure the sport gets from the professional leagues.
All of this in ingrained in American culture. Whether it's capitalism, or high level sports, or pick up ball. It's all the same ball game.
Calling out a single one of these is incredibly disingenuous. Would society worsen if we never had competitive rowing again? No. Would it worsen if we got rid of the 24 sports that the NCAA oversees? Absolutely.
> Sports are important. Being competitive is important. Having hobbies is important.
Even if I agreed with these unexplained assertions, none of this justifies collegiate varsity sports in the face of all the obstacles it places on the primary objective of university education, or indeed, the oddity of placing SAT scores and minimum GPAs as a barrier to professional athleticism.
Your thesis seems to be professional sports are a priori important, and until we can replace varsity sports that feed professional leagues with a non-affiliated minor league, varsity must not be allowed to end. But there's really only one professional league I can think of that absolutely depends on the NCAA for athlete training, and we all seem to agree they can afford to solve this threat to their highly profitable existence; Congress has even granted them an antitrust exemption so it seems entirely fair society demands they develop a solution.
Why is skipping higher education to try to play professionally a massive risk? If it doesn’t work out, you can go to college after. Lots of people get jobs right after high school, then go back to school later. Not only that, but those people are usually going to jobs with a lot less upside than being a professional athlete.
> I think Olympic athletes get government funding in the US as well.
This is incorrect.
"Unlike other national Olympic organizations, [Team USA] receives no government funds. It pays for its operations and helps fund athletes and the national governing bodies of its sports through the sale of media and sponsorship rights and some modest fund-raising." - NYT
Just because someone doesn’t go to college at 18 doesn’t mean they’re “skipping” higher education. Spending a few years making 30k a year to play basketball would be awesome - my father had teammates in college who put off grad/med school to go play in a shitty European leagues or random minor leagues around North America, it never sounded like they regretted it.
If they followed Hockey’s example, where playing a year in the MJ gives you a year of tuition, it could work out great for young players.
If they can't make money to pay athletes, maybe they do not deserve to survive. We don't subsidise aspiring people in most other fields, why should sports be any different.
Baseball does an adequate job with its system of minor league teams. Pretty much every other country in the world manages to have professional sports leagues without having universities be their feeder teams.
Even in your scenario, there's nothing stopping the aspiring golfer from attending Stanford part-time while they try to make it in pro-golf. Or applying and deferring admission for a couple of years. Frankly, they'd do better academically if they didn't have golf distracting them.