{"id":410,"date":"2006-07-20T10:50:20","date_gmt":"2006-07-20T10:50:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/07\/20\/clustering-of-athletes\/"},"modified":"2006-07-20T10:50:20","modified_gmt":"2006-07-20T10:50:20","slug":"clustering-of-athletes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/07\/20\/clustering-of-athletes\/","title":{"rendered":"Clustering of Athletes"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the wake of academic scandals involving the Auburn football program, Inside Higher Ed reports on a study looking at the majors of athletes<\/a>. The results will be shocking to, well basically no-one who has ever set foot on a college campus:<\/p>\n

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While accusations of widespread abuse like that alleged at Auburn are unusual, “clustering” of athletes — in which large numbers of athletes at an institution major in a particular program or department, out of proportion to other students at the college — is common. A 2002-3 analysis<\/a> by USA Today<\/cite> found that a large percentage of football players at Auburn and Duke University (a quarter and a third of the teams, respectively) majored in sociology, while tiny fractions of all undergraduates majored in that field. At North Carolina State, the University of Michigan and University of Southern Mississippi, the most popular major among football players tended to be sports management, also far out of proportion with their peer students.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Really? Football players majoring in sports management at a higher rate than non-athletes? Well, that’s clearly impossible without institutional corruption. Round up the usual suspects, Captain Renault!<\/p>\n

(More after the cut)<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Are athletes deliberately seeking out easier majors? Almost certainly– they’ve already got huge demands on their time, and they’d be fools not to look for easier classes. Practically every student does this, in one form or another– when I was doing my physics thesis, I made a concerted effort to find non-science classes that would require the minimum possible amount of work, so I could spend more time in the lab.<\/p>\n

And the whole basis of comparison here is screwy. If you want to look for a sign of corruption or favoritism in this, the proper comparison is not between football players and the general student population, but between football players and other large groups of people with common interests. Even in the absence of pressures from the athletic department, it would be reasonable to expect the football players might have other things in common that would lead them to major in the same subjects. “Clustering” of football players in sociology or sports management shouldn’t be any more surprising than “clustering” of pre-meds in biology or chemistry.<\/p>\n

In a rare reversal of the normal order, the voice of sanity comes from Wally Renfro, an official of the NCAA:<\/p>\n

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“I’m just not sure what it proves,” he says. “It suggests there’s something inherently wrong with athletes [clustering] in certain majors, and I’m not sure there’s something inherently wrong there.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the wake of academic scandals involving the Auburn football program, Inside Higher Ed reports on a study looking at the majors of athletes. The results will be shocking to, well basically no-one who has ever set foot on a college campus: While accusations of widespread abuse like that alleged at Auburn are unusual, “clustering”… Continue reading Clustering of Athletes<\/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],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-410","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410","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=410"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/410\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}