{"id":3170,"date":"2008-11-19T09:12:58","date_gmt":"2008-11-19T09:12:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/11\/19\/athletes-and-academia-part-ii\/"},"modified":"2008-11-19T09:12:58","modified_gmt":"2008-11-19T09:12:58","slug":"athletes-and-academia-part-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/11\/19\/athletes-and-academia-part-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"Athletes and Academia, part II"},"content":{"rendered":"

I got a bunch of really good comments to yesterday’s post about athletes and attitudes toward education<\/a>. Unfortunately, yesterday was also a stay-at-home-with-SteelyKid day, and she spent a lot of time demanding to be held or otherwise catered to, so I didn’t have a chance to respond. I’d like to correct that today by responding to the main threads of argument in those comments.<\/p>\n

Taking these in no particular order, Moshe writes:<\/p>\n

\n

Not sure there is a serious argument here, athletes are different in so many ways, but I’ll bite – here is another difference. Some students and athletes have their head screwed on right, and they really are interested in obtaining a good education. In most schools such students will find an encouraging environment, but I expect that in most division 1 schools (like the university of Texas where I tutored athletes for a few years), athletes will find that they were hired to do a job, and time consuming hobbies are not what they are paid to do with their time.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That’s a fair point. But how is this different than a student who has to work a regular job to pay the tuition bill? If we’re going to be down on athletes because sports is a drain on their time, should we also be down on “non-traditional” students who have jobs and families?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In fact, one of the very best students I’ve worked with was a “non-traditional” student. He was several years older than his classmates, and was paying his bills by waiting tables at at least two different restaurants in the area. On one of the few occasions when he missed class, I returned a homework assignment to him when I went to happy hour at one of those places.<\/p>\n

He had vastly more demands on his time than the other students, but he was much better about managing his time and resources than the other students in the class. He showed up to almost every class, and turned in every single assignment, when many of his classmates with far less excuse missed classes and failed to turn in homework on a regular basis.<\/p>\n

While I agree that sports are a big time sink, students who are sufficiently committed can make it work. Part of what inspired yesterday’s post was the discussion surrounding Myron Rolle of Florida State<\/a>, who plays football and is a candidate for a Rhodes Scholarship. If he can rack up the grades to be a Rhodes Scholar while playing football at Florida State, I don’t see how you can argue that sports are an insuperable obstacle to academic success.<\/p>\n

Another similar argument is that athletes are the recipients of special benefits. As Jim Thomerson puts it:<\/p>\n

\n

If we compare two entering students, both not quite ready, both just interested in a future job, the difference between the athelete and the non athelete is that the institution will make a much greater effort to retain the athelete than it will for the non athelete. For one thing, the institution has a greater investment in the athelete than it does in a similar non athelate. That investment is jepordized if the athelete does not maintain academic elegiability.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That’s true. But couldn’t you just as well turn this around and argue that we’re doing a disservice to the rest of the student body, by not giving them the support they need to succeed?<\/p>\n

I’ve talked about this before, in the context of graduation rates<\/a>. Every year we get dozens of hand-wringing pieces about the poor graduation rates of football and basketball players at Division I schools, but if you compare the graduation rate for the mostly African-American students on those teams to their demographic peers, the athletic graduation rates don’t look so bad any more.<\/p>\n

The real scandal isn’t that the graduation rate for black male athletes is low, the scandal is that the graduation rate for black male students<\/strong> is low. <\/p>\n

The other main thread of argument has to do with allocation of resources. As someone signing their comment “C” says:<\/p>\n

\n

More damaging to the institution, though, is the way the sports become the focus. A year or two ago, my state had a budget crisis such that the university was forced to cut academic assets (e.g. staffing, library hours). However, the football coach wanted a new stadium, so the state legislators banded together to get the money to build it.<\/p>\n

I get that a lot of people like sports. But a televisable sport costs a lot of money, that only a rare few universities make back from the sport itself. I guess I’m frustrated that administrators prefer skyboxes to being in charge of an excellent learning institution.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This is a tough one, because it gets into murky questions of budgeting. The key question is whether it would’ve been possible to get that same money for something else. That is, would the same money have been available for academic programs?<\/p>\n

If the choice is between a $10 million donation toward a new football stadium and a $10 million donation to the physics department, then it’s obviously foolish to build the stadium. If the choice is between $10 million for a new stadium and nothing, it’s not clear that the school,shouldn’t take the money.<\/p>\n

Of course, it’s not clear that they should<\/strong> take the money, either. The comment by Sparky Clarkson<\/a> makes the “shouldn’t” case, with a link that’s worth looking at.<\/p>\n

Finally, a number of people made analogies between athletes and “legacies,” the under-qualified children of alumni, preferably wealthy ones. I have only a cynical comment to make about this: the analogy breaks down on financial grounds. Athletes cost money, in the form of scholarships and additional support resources. Legacies are generally paying full tuition. They’re not subsidized by other students, they’re subsidizing other students.<\/p>\n

I can’t swear that I’ll be any better today about responding to comments– I’ve got a doctor’s appointment and a huge pile of manuscript revisions to get through– but it’s been an interesting discussion so far, and I hope to continue it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I got a bunch of really good comments to yesterday’s post about athletes and attitudes toward education. Unfortunately, yesterday was also a stay-at-home-with-SteelyKid day, and she spent a lot of time demanding to be held or otherwise catered to, so I didn’t have a chance to respond. I’d like to correct that today by responding… Continue reading Athletes and Academia, part II<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,26,31,75,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3170","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-basketball","category-football","category-society","category-sports","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3170","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3170"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3170\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}