Inside American Education (39 page)

In the long run, however, when the issue arises whether or not to replace the stadium or sports complex when it wears out, the financially rational and responsible decision would be to shut down the athletic program entirely if it is losing money. But few administrators take this long run view because their tenure may not extend into the long run—and indeed, their tenure may be shortened by publicly advocating any such policy, especially if they have been approving huge athletic department budgets for years and now claim that it is all a losing proposition. Financial losses from athletic programs are so widespread and so commonplace that there are innumerable rationales to justify them, and innumerable accounting practices to understate their real magnitude, so that the path of least resistance may well be to let the red ink continue to flow and let sleeping dogs lie.

In short, the decision to keep subsidizing athletic programs indefinitely is not an irrational decision for college and university administrators, even if it makes no sense financially from the standpoint of the institution, the students, or the taxpayers. If academic accounting practices were less creative and more bluntly honest, the huge losses created by many college sports programs might be carried on the books as career insurance for college administrators.

COLLEGE ATHLETES

Students who engage in sports as an avocation for exercise or recreation must be sharply distinguished from those college athletes for whom sports are the central, consuming purpose of their presence on campus, determining the courses they take, the time these courses are scheduled (so as not to interfere with
practice), and determining also whether or not the money to pay their tuition and living expenses will continue to be forthcoming, or will be cut off for athletic deficiencies, as distinguished from academic deficiencies.

Players in campus intramural sports are not really college athletes in this sense, nor are most intercollegiate competitors in swimming, tennis, and other “non-revenue sports,” nor perhaps varsity athletes in any sport at some of the smaller colleges where sports are taken casually. Whitman College, for example, was more than a hundred years old before it won a national championship in any sport—skiing, in this case.
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At Haverford, the head coach of women’s tennis and Volleyball was able to run up an impressive won-and-lost record while working on her own doctorate in physical education.
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But these are not big-time college athletics.

The classic college athlete in the sense used here is the big-time football or basketball player, competing in major conferences for the prospect of post-season play and a post-college professional career. Big-time athletics involve major investments of students’ time and the college’s money. Even at an academically highly-rated institution like Stanford University, where intercollegiate athletics are not an overwhelming interest, the athletic director dispenses more than 250 full scholarships, worth $5.7 million a year—some of this paid by earnings on a $38 million athletic endowment raised for this purpose.
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This is more than is officially reported at some colleges and universities where intercollegiate sports play a larger role than at Stanford, for many of these other institutions channel money for athletes through the regular financial aid office, so as not to call it all athletic scholarships.
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Ivy League colleges award no athletic scholarships, but they are also seldom prominent among the nation’s top-rated football or basketball teams. Big-time sports means big-time money—and big-time pressure on the college athletes. It is significant that Ivy League teams were once able to compete with top teams from around the country, half a century or more ago, but that was before television and other big-money forces made college football and basketball too demanding of students’ time and institutional resources to be compatible with maintaining high academic standards for college athletes.

The Athletic Cartel

The basic relationship between the college—which is to say, the coach—and the college athlete is very asymmetrical. With minor exceptions, the athlete is committed to the institution for four years, whereas the institution is committed to the athlete for only one year at a time. If his athletic performance falls below expectations, financial aid can be terminated, but if his performance reaches a professional level before the four years are up, he is expected to remain in college.

Until relatively recently, the professional leagues abided by their collusive agreements with the NCAA and would not touch such athletes until their college eligibility was up, or until 5 years after their class had entered college. A lawsuit forced the National Basketball Association to violate this collusive agreement and individual legal challenges have forced the National Football League and the NCAA to make more exceptions.
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However, it speaks volumes about the mismatch between coaches and college athletes that such one-sided arrangements could have been created and endured so long.

There are few, if any, transactions in any marketplace with as gross a mismatch between the transactors as those between a high school athlete negotiating with a college coach for a place on the team. Not only is the coach likely to be more experienced by decades, but he also controls vast sums of money, from both inside and outside the university, carries much weight with the college admissions committee (even in Ivy League schools),
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and has contacts and influence with high school coaches, for whom he can do various favors,
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and who in return can influence their athletes in an apparently disinterested way, “for their own good,” to sign with college coach
X
rather than college coach
Y
. Most important of all, the coach belongs to a tight, nationwide cartel—the NCAA—which sets the basic terms within which individual coaches compete for players.

As if these were not enough mismatches, big-time coaches have dealt with generations of students but the student is facing his first encounter with the labyrinthine world of college athletics. Finally, a disproportionate number of top athletes in football and basketball are black youngsters from poor backgrounds, poorly educated themselves and with poorly educated
parents, and are often the first members of their families to go to college, so that they are unlikely to have any informed guides to rely on. Having seen many black professional athletes with huge salaries, they may not realize that more than 90 percent of all college athletes in football, basketball, or baseball will never play professionally.
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Black collegiate athletes who do not go on into professional sports are especially bad off. Only 27 percent of black athletes in Division I colleges have graduated five years after entering college, compared to 52 percent among white Division I athletes. The black athletes typically entered college with much weaker academic records and 43 percent leave in bad standing, compared to 20 percent among white athletes in the same Division.
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These youngsters have simply wasted their time and risked their bodies to entertain and enrich other people.

In effect, the college athlete in big-time sports is buying a lottery ticket and paying for it with his body and with four years of his life. He may also pay for it through the corrosive cynicism generated by participating in the various shabby tricks designed to maintain his eligibility to play, by pretending to be a student while avoiding the demands of real education.

Athletics versus Education

Being a college athlete is a full-time job. A study commissioned by the NCAA showed that Division I athletes spent an average of 30 hours a week on their principal sport, during the season for that sport, and 18 hours a week even during the off-season. In both cases, this was more time than the average college athlete spent in classes and laboratories. During the sport season, the time spent on athletics exceeded both class and lab time, and the time spent preparing for class, all combined.
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While this was a study of Division I institutions, Division I is itself divided into three parts, with Division I-A representing the most intense competition—big-time sports. Professor Harry Edwards, a sociologist at Berkeley specializing in studies of athletics, has estimated that Division I-A basketball players spend 50 hours a week on their sport and football players up to 60 hours. Moreover, he points out, the gruelling nature of this activity often means that fatigue, aches, and pains render
their remaining hours less effective for academic work. Others knowledgeable about college sports have made similar estimates of the time they consume in the top conferences.
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Athletics versus Academics

Given the demands of high-pressure sports and the sub-standard academic backgrounds of many college athletes, there is little prospect of serious academic work for many of those who compete in the top athletic conferences. Yet they must pass enough courses to remain eligible to play under NCAA rules. Therefore they “major in eligibility,” as it is cynically phrased. That is, they find such courses and such instructors (including athletic coaches) as will enable them to get by without spending time that would cut into the athletic requirements of practice, learning plays, physical conditioning, and travel. At Miami University, a basketball player who never attended a class nor did any assignment was given an A by the instructor—who was his coach. At Hampton University, the academic records of football players were simply altered.
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Even at Harvard, courses characterized by the student guide as “gut” courses were also noted for attracting athletes.
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Often the team has tutors or advisors who help players with their choice of courses, as well as helping them in those courses. One such academic counselor boasted that he could keep a cockroach eligible for two years.
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Periodic scandals of illiterate athletes going through college suggest that the exaggeration was not as great as might be thought.
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Some idea of how modest the requirements of eligibility can be may be indicated by the record of a University of Iowa football player who took courses on billiards, coaching football, soccer, and bowling as a freshman and ended up with a 1.62 grade-point average (D+) out of a possible 4.0. By making a D in a summer school course, he rescued his eligibility for his sophomore year.
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Even with such lenient standards, some athletes fail to maintain their eligibility—and some colleges let them play anyway. Florida State University, for example, allowed a star athlete to play in the Sugar Bowl after he flunked all his fall semester courses.
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At North Carolina State University, basketball players’ grades were changed under pressure from
coaches.
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For some athletes, ignoring the rules and having them bent or disregarded by academic authorities is a pattern that begins even before they reach college. A high school teacher in Waco, Texas, was fired after refusing to change a student’s grade to maintain his eligibility.
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A Detroit high school teacher discovered that many grades he had given athletes had been changed from failing to passing before being entered into the official record.
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A former dean of Arizona State University put it this way:

There are certain truths in life. You don’t spit into the wind, you don’t tug on Superman’s cape, and you don’t mess around with star football players.
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Despite such favoritism and scandal, most top-level (Division I-A) football and basketball players do not graduate—partly because this favoritism is focussed on keeping them eligible to play, not getting them a degree, much less an education. Once again, it is necessary to distinguish the big-time varsity athletes in large, revenue-producing sports like football and basketball from athletes at colleges which do not have high-pressure sports programs and from athletes in such other sports as tennis, swimming, Volleyball, or track, whose demands do not usually have such devastating impacts on academic performance.

It is true, but misleading, to say that college athletes as a group graduate from college at a slightly higher rate than students in general
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because this lumps together athletes in a wide spectrum of sports and institutions. In all the major Division I-A conferences—the Big Ten, the Atlantic Coast Conference, the Pac-10, etc.—football players graduate at a
lower
rate than other students and basketball players graduate at an even lower rate than football players.
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In the Southeastern Conference, only 14 percent of the basketball players admitted in 1984 had graduated by August 1989.
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It can also be misleading to point to colleges like Stanford with high academic standards and numerous athletic championships, when those athletic championships have been in sports like tennis, water polo, Volleyball, and swimming.
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Credit is due to some institutions like Georgetown University, where 90 percent of the basketball team graduated, but such institutions are more than
counterbalanced by places like Memphis State, where no basketball player graduated for an entire decade.
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