Athletics

It is a sad reality that many colleges do not treat their athletes as students, but rather as semi-professionals, for four years before dropping them into the real world without a meaningful degree or workforce-ready skills. Particularly at Division I basketball and football schools, colleges use their athletes to win championships and gain national prominence but too often leave them woefully unprepared for life away from the gridiron and hoops.

As I argued last week, the commercialization of college sports has gone too far. In this post, I will lay out the steps that I believe the NCAA and Congress should take to make sure that colleges aren’t allowed to lose touch with what really matters in higher education: graduating students with meaningful degrees.The first step toward reforming college sports is requiring greater transparency about the academic outcomes of athletes. Without better information, neither the NCAA nor Congress will be able to isolate and target academic abuses. The NCAA must also step up to the plate and fix flaws with its current academic monitoring and penalty system, as well as with its eligibility rules.

I've been a huge fan of college sports for as long as I can remember. If I had to pick my all-time favorite activity for a Saturday afternoon, it would be attending a college football or basketball game. But in recent years, I started to realize that college athletics is not exactly the idealized extracurricular activity of talented students that I had imagined as a child.

When I entered the higher education policy world as a writer for Higher Ed Watch two years ago, I wanted to learn more. What I found was not pretty, and I was soon struggling to figure out how college sports had lost its way, and how policymakers could steer it back in the right direction.

Now, my time on the sports beat at Higher Ed Watch is drawing to a close. Before departing the higher education blog world, I wanted to revisit my recommendations for reforming college athletics. I understand that change will not come quickly or easily, but I do believe that demanding greater accountability from colleges for the academic performance of their athletes could significantly improve the way sports programs currently do business.

My Changing View of College Sports

When I set out to investigate the nexus between college athletics and academics, I quickly found myself immersed in appalling graduation rates and stories of academic corruption. It wasn't difficult to lay bare the dirty, profit-driven side of the college athletics world. But as visible as the problems were, few people seemed to care. Outside of isolated exposés and a few dedicated professors, there weren't very many serious efforts at reform.

With all of the talk about the commercialization of college sports, there is a common assumption that university athletics programs pay for themselves. A new report from the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) reveals, however, that most Division I schools are actually footing a significant part of the bill for their sports teams. The report also shows the amount colleges are spending on athletics has been rising rapidly, raising questions for students, faculty members, and taxpayers about colleges' priorities (hint, hint: we're talking about extravagant athletics facilities and sky-rocketing coaching salaries here).

In its new spending report, the NCAA, for the first time, provides a break down of the revenue that intercollegiate athletics programs receive -- distinguishing between those earned by the sports teams themselves ("generated revenue") and those that the colleges provide to the programs ("allocated revenue"). The NCAA's decision to provide these breakdowns represents an important step forward for athletic spending transparency in that it allows us to see the extent to which colleges are subsidizing their sports programs.

However, the usefulness of the report is limited as it discloses only aggregate numbers. As a result, we are left in the dark about how this is playing out institution by institution. At Higher Ed Watch, we believe that the federal government needs to strengthen its institutional reporting requirements on athletics spending, because it doesn't appear that the NCAA is willing to expose its members to that type of scrutiny anytime soon.

When the National Collegiate Athletic Association announced its penalties for poor athlete academic performance this week, it let many high-profile Division I college basketball and football teams off the hook.

After four years of collecting data, the organization was set to enact full scholarship penalties for teams that fail to keep their athletes on track to graduate. But because of the NCAA's generous use of waivers for wealthy, high-profile athletic programs, as well as a flawed penalty structure, many teams with poor academic records found themselves in the clear.

Under the NCAA's Academic Progress Rates (APR) system, teams get points each semester for retaining athletes and for keeping them academically eligible. The NCAA has a system of penalties for teams that post low APRs. For the past three years, most teams have not been subject to the penalties, however, because of squad-size adjustments, or exemptions due to insufficient data.

Last week, Higher Ed Watch published its annual "Academic Sweet Sixteen" bracket, which ranks the teams in the NCAA tournament based on their basketball team graduation rates. While it's important to consider how many players leave school with degrees in their hands, there's a significant flaw in the comparison. We have no way to determine whether players who graduated actually learned anything or obtained the skills necessary to enter the workforce.

As we discussed during the football season, there is no data on college quality for athletes and very little for college students in general. It's widely known that athletes often cluster in "jock majors," which provide them with classes that demand and teach very little. The goal of many big-time basketball teams is simply to keep their players academically eligible, not to give them an education that will be of value in the future.

But because there is no objective way to track the relative worth of athletes' degrees (and remember, this problems extends to all consumers of higher education), we have to rely on anecdotal evidence.

Amid the flashy, commercialized spectacle of March Madness, it's time again for Higher Ed Watch to bring some sanity to the national debate about which team deserves to be crowned the NCAA champion. Like last year, we have a different take on how to calculate basketball team success. It's not about RPI, or victory margin, or strength of schedule. We're interested in how the Sweet Sixteen basketball teams are performing in the classroom.

Higher Ed Watch has been critical of the student-athlete charade at most top basketball and football programs. These teams do not adequately support the academic development of their athletes, instead using them to win on the field and court and gain national media attention and commercial value for the school.

It's March, and for any basketball fan, this means three glorious weeks of watching the premier teams in the nation battle it out in a single-elimination, high-stakes, high-pressure tournament. March also means big money for the NCAA, which cashed in on the popularity of March Madness by giving CBS the rights to broadcast the tournament for $6 billion over 11 years.

One team you aren't going to hear anything about during the tournament is Alcorn State, a small, historically black college that finished the season 7-24, at the bottom of the Southwestern Conference (SWAC). As we at Higher Ed Watch discussed last week, there is a growing college sports spending gap between schools like Alcorn State that are struggling to sustain athletics programs and elite sports schools that are rolling in millions of dollars of revenue.

News is circulating about the growing wealth gap between a few elite, well-endowed colleges and the rest of higher education. A Congressional investigation into endowment growth and hoarding, the fears of budget cuts at state universities as the economy declines, and the new, expensive financial aid plans at many elite schools have added fuel to the story and brought focus to a worrisome picture that has been developing for some time.

[slideshow] The widening wealth gap is also a stark reality in the world of college sports. Just as most of the higher education media attention traditionally has been given to elite colleges and their spending decisions, most of the interest in athletics spending is directed at a small number of big-time football and basketball programs and conferences.

Two weeks ago, the NCAA accused Kelvin Sampson, the basketball coach at Indiana University, of committing five major rules violations involving recruiting and improper phone calls. The NCAA report was harsh in its assessment of the situation, and media coverage of the report was extensive. The media portrayed the NCAA as a serious actor that would come down hard on Indiana if the school didn't take swift action itself. The school responded by getting rid of Sampson last Friday with a $750,000 settlement.

Contrast this with the academic cheating scandal at Florida State University that came to full light last December. Sixty-one players on various sports teams cheated in an online music history class, making this one of the most widespread cases of academic corruption ever publicly disclosed. Media attention to the scandal was limited outside of Florida, and was mostly focused on the fact that FSU wouldn’t be competitive in its football bowl game because the school had suspended 36 players.

Diversity and minority recruitment are hot button words in most four year college admissions offices. There's congratulations when enrollment demographics show greater racial diversity and consternation when minority numbers drop.

But are college admissions office recruitment efforts working? Colleges will, in a knee-jerk fashion, say: yes, look at our racial and ethnic percentages! College access for minorities is a reality here! But how much is minority recruitment in admissions offices really contributing to the diversity of college campuses?

Unfortunately, at some Division I schools, not much. The black-white diversity on many campuses is not always the result of better minority recruitment. It’s often the result of athletics, and in particular, football.

Inside Higher Ed analyzed data from the NCAA and found that at 46 colleges (of the almost 330 colleges that participate in Division I athletics) athletes comprise at least a third of the black male student population. At 96 schools, athletes comprise at least 20 percent. Compare that to the percentage of all male students who are athletes: 3 percent.