The athletic programs at highly selective institutions are out of sync with the schools’ missions.
JONATHAN R. COLE
National signing day for high-school football prospects has passed. The March Madness basketball tournament looms just over the horizon. Public scandals and patterns of inappropriate behavior among college athletes made headlines in 2016. Is it time to take stock of what we in the world of higher education have created and assess whether the emphasis placed on athletics in universities is excessive, if not totally out of control? I’m asking this as someone who participated in two college sports and who even today follows sports closely.
The money that exchanges hands in the college-sports world is exorbitant. In 41 states, the highest-paid public employee is not a professor, neurosurgeon, or politician, but rather a college football or basketball coach. Jim Harbaugh, who leads the Michigan Wolverines’ football program, was reportedly paid $9 million in 2016. The team performed well on the field, and two of Harbaugh’s assistants were also reportedly compensated with near million-dollar salaries. And the Big House is far from the only institution cutting huge checks. In 2014, National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) revenues totaled nearly $1 billion, most of which came from television-rights agreements; far less came from attendance at college-sporting events.
And yet, despite the swollen bank accounts associated with college athletics and the large crowds that flock to high-profile games, very few universities come out in the black from support of athletics by fans and boosters. True, universities are always looking for new sources of revenue, but intercollegiate athletics turn out not to be a profitable path. Derek Bok, the former president of Harvard, opined: “Only a handful of institutions have consistently earned a surplus from big-time intercollegiate athletics if the costs involved are fully accounted for.”
In addition to these monetary woes, strings of scandals have plagued schools both big and small in recent years, highlighting the broken higher-education experiences many student-athletes face. In 2016, Harvard announced it was canceling its men’s soccer season because of allegations that players had written sexually explicit “scouting reports,” which graded recruits of the women’s soccer team based on appearance. Not to be outdone, Columbia suspended its wrestling team for similar reasons. Princeton also suspended its men’s swimming and diving teams for “misogynistic and racist” materials created by team members, and Amherst did the same for its men’s cross-country team.
Outside the Ivy League, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, is one of the most innovative universities in the nation, having created, for example, the first social-science research organization in the country. Yet it has admitted that for years it created fictional courses for student-athletes: Academic advisers and professors funneled athletes into those so-called “paper” classes. The courses didn’t actually exist, and athletes were given the “high grades” required to ensure their on-field eligibility. Though the school admitted to wrongdoing, the NCAA has not meted out any penalties for these violations. The case is still pending, despite several NCAA inquiries and details chronicled and published by a Chapel Hill professor and his colleague who worked on academic counseling at UNC-Chapel Hill. Perhaps North Carolina is just too valuable a source of television and other NCAA revenues for it “to fail”—that is, for it to be severely sanctioned and disciplined for its transgression of ethics and NCAA rules.