7 ms·

Athletics cost colleges, students millions

26 points by anu_gupta 13y ago

randyrand 13y ago
I hope this article doesn't get passed around very much - it's terrible. How can you have a discussion on athletic spending without mentioning revenue at all!
- Zaechie7 13y ago
  Did you read the article? "Nearly every university loses money on sports. Even after private donations and ticket sales, they fill the gap by tapping students paying tuition or state taxpayers." Personally, I don't understand this US college sports thing at all.
  - arbitrage 13y ago
    gambling on college sports is a huge secondary black market, with many billions of dollars changing hands every year. that should clarify the popularity of US college sports.
VeejayRampay 13y ago
Athletics are also premium advertisement for a university. A quick example: I'm from France and I'd never have heard from Gonzaga weren't it for John Stockton. That in itself has tremendous value, for big or small universities. It can put you on the map.
- Zaechie7 13y ago
  Like sports successes (especially of individual players) have anything to do with their education and/or research quality.
  - VeejayRampay 13y ago
    Of course it doesn't. I'm just saying all the money invested in those sport teams are not 100% money down the drain. They're sometimes a good investment.
    - VLM 13y ago
      > They're sometimes a good investment. Has it benefited them, or you, or anyone else, in any way? I suspect not. Have to be careful about the definition of good. Or the definition of investment. Although no one will admit to being "that guy", everyone personally is certain that everyone else is "that guy" who makes decisions based on (insert disparaged subject). There is some minimal level of startup lesson in that actually being useful is unnecessary; only a perception is necessary.
    - acjohnson55 13y ago
      I have to disagree with you there. It's a zero-sum game. College athletics aren't significantly expanding the national pool of college students. Without them, colleges could use much more mundane, direct (read: far cheaper) forms of advertisement. In most cases, athletics programs are public money and tuition money being poured on something with absolutely minimal academic merit.
      - jasonlotito 13y ago
        > In most cases, athletics programs are public money and tuition money being poured on something with absolutely minimal academic merit. That's not true. In "most" cases, athletics programs do not provide tuition at all, and most student athletes do not receive anything in terms of tuition reimbursement. In most cases, students are still paying all the tuition and still are required to maintain their academic standings. Because of this, a good program can attract out of state students, who will generally pay more out of pocket precisely because they are out of state. Finally, lumping all sports together and claiming they are a waste of money ignores the reality that all sports are not created equal. Sure, adding a football stadium will be expensive, but counting that against the cross-country team is silly.
natejenkins 13y ago
And this is without paying the athletes, who should be earning their market value. Students walk around campus wearing their favorite player's jersey and said player gets nothing more than a scholarship out of the deal. I'm however surprised to hear that football isn't a big moneymaker for universities. I remember being told that Kentucky, a famous place for basketball, makes more off of football, and a quick search seems to confirm that: http://kykernel.com/2012/09/17/less-funding-could-hurt-uk-football/ http://kykernel.com/2012/09/17/less-funding-could-hurt-uk-fo... Kentucky made $18 million off of football for 2012-2013, while making only $8 million off of its wildly popular basketball program. All other sports combined lost $11.6 million. Still a pretty nice little profit. Maybe their math is a bit different.
- VLM 13y ago
  Depends if you define "moneymaker" as revenue or profit and how wide of a range you're willing to spread the small number of net positives over. The only relevant startup lesson I can see in this story, is its the same old pattern where entrenched interests have a huge financial stake in growing, and no opposition exists, resulting in the eventual death or disability of the host. Its the cancer lifecycle. As a design pattern, it kills businesses (like universities... or startups) just as well as it kills people. Anytime money flows out, have to find some force to oppose it, or inevitably all the money will eventually flow out that direction. That's what makes it very weird that they specifically selected a fifth year senior in an entrepreneurship program, of all things, to quote. Someone in marketing? Sure. Someone in phys therapy? Sure. Someone in "newscasting/communications"? Sure. But an entrepreneur of all people has the very least resources to be drilling unpatchable holes in his new companies money bucket.
- fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
  >And this is without paying the athletes, who should be earning their market value. Wait a minute. I'll agree that student athletes ought to be paid something, the current arrangement is exploitation. But I'm not sure that starting a athlete salary arms-race is the answer. And what about students who (end up) contributing disproportionately through research & development (patents, and patent licensing)? >I'm however surprised to hear that football isn't a big moneymaker for universities. Isn't everyone? Someone finally addressed the myth that pouring money into athletics is like buying golden egg laying geese. Good.
jackmaney 13y ago
And in other news: water is wet. Also, that big, yellow-orange ball in the sky keeps us warm. More at 11.
UweSchmidt 13y ago
The article starts with "College sports create undeniable campus pride and identity" and leaves this sentence unquestioned, as if it was a positive thing. Regardless of the money spent (or made, if college sports could be run profitable somehow), there seems to be a huge cost for society by setting the focus on the wrong things. It seems that being a good student is valued highly by society, but the shortcut - becoming a (sports) star is even better! This leads to a large percentage of young people investing significant resources (time, energy, health) into this dream. Professional sports is just entertainment, and assuming that the enjoyment comes from a relative comparison between players and teams, or the delta between two rather abstract numbers (this performance, compared to a "record"), then it seems that there are some resources not spent well. I cannot see how sports and educations should be married the way they are at american colleges. Anyone?
- cafard 13y ago
  I think that at a visceral level we are uncomfortable with education--it is undemocratic, anti-egalitarian, hierarchical--and are happiest when we can turn it into something else: a sports program, a jobs program, daycare. On the other hand, I suppose it does serve as advertising. Probably a lot more people know of Stanford because of its occasionally excellent football and basketball teams than know of it because of what it has done for computing.
  - guard-of-terra 13y ago
    "education--it is undemocratic, anti-egalitarian, hierarchical" That does not have to be a innate property of education. It's just how science education seems to work, and other education mock science education. Not saying it's the wrong mode for science education, but.
  - bayesianhorse 13y ago
    How is education undemocratic? Just because it's a good idea to defer some decisions or evaluations to people who actually know their stuff, does not mean that individual rights are in danger.
  - 13y ago
coldcode 13y ago
I wish I could start a tech focused university without any sports at all. Be interesting to see what happened.
- iliis 13y ago
  This seems to be the norm here in Europe. Our university does have a very diverse offer of sports activities (everything from running, dancing, boxing or paragliding to jazz and waterboarding), but it is more a hobby-thingie and doesn't touch normal study-life at all.
  - itsbonczek 13y ago
    True, but there's a pretty good chance that you have a local football club to root for. College athletics is the American equivalent of that.
    - johnchristopher 13y ago
      No, really. Our equivalent is much less hyped and attended and players are rarely university or college students. Most don't have any HS degree and are "international" or at least "inter-city player".
      - brudgers 13y ago
        I think you missed the basis of comparison. In the US, the role of local sports team is largely filled by scholastic sports programs - i.e. small towns in the US turn out on Friday nights to root for the local high school football (American) team in 8000 seat stadiums in part because there are no significant second and third and fourth division professional sports teams. The public land grant universities tend to fill a similar role at the regional level due to the geographic expanse of the US relative to European countries - e.g. Alabama is about the size of England as a catchment area. It might be argued that the US minor league baseball system maps onto the European football pyramid model - but it is probably a mistake. Unlike the lower tiers of the footballing pyramid which tend to consist of independent teams which sell players on for profit, minor league baseball consists almost entirely of developmental teams affiliated with major league franchises and have their rosters and lineups and substitution patterns dictated from above rather than in the interest of points on the scoreboard or standings.
Tichy 13y ago
No idea why athletics is bundled with colleges, but I would guess those expenses count as advertising?
tpainton 13y ago
Baseball did it right with minor leagues. Football needs to follow. College should not be a minor league football franchise.
- acjohnson55 13y ago
  I'm not sure baseball can be held up as a model, given that the minor leagues are "minor" because they are under the boot of the MLB, due to the antitrust exemption [1]. Also, it's noteworthy that college baseball does exist and it goes deep into the summer. Pro basketball has an official minor league, the NBA D-League, but college basketball is still out of control. [1] http://www.beyondtheboxscore.com/2008/12/3/678134/the-history-of-baseball-s http://www.beyondtheboxscore.com/2008/12/3/678134/the-histor...
Vivtek 13y ago
College sports undeniably have their benefits, creating university pride and an identity that no philosophy or classics program will ever match. Right there is the failure of the American experiment.
- jseliger 13y ago
  Colleges have always changed shape and form, and today they've grown into what Clark Kerr calls the "Multiversity" in The Uses of the University (http://www.amazon.com/The-Uses-University-Essentials-Government/dp/0674005325 http://www.amazon.com/The-Uses-University-Essentials-Governm...), which is worth reading if you're interested in such issues. Beyond that, philosophy and classics are interesting citations because the healthy, important parts of philosophy have mostly been shucked into science (http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html, or William James's Pragmatism) and classics are interesting but the corpus is static; it is not easy to come up with new and interesting things to say about The Iliad In 1946, I'm sure someone was writing about the decline of theology and Latin and lamenting the failure of the American experiment. (Despite what I wrote above I am still against the giving of scholarships for sports and think that the pro sports run by big-deal programs should be treated as professions, which they are by any reasonable standard of the word).
  - Vivtek 13y ago
    It's not the reference to philosophy and the classics I meant - it's actually the decline of academics in general in favor of Reality College, and it's not new. I regard the specific mention of philosophy and the classics as a sort of fusty stand-in for all the other academics. Add to that the "running the university like a business" - which generally means jacking up CEO pay into the stratosphere while cranking the productivity screws on adjuncts and raising prices for the customers (which in an earlier world were "students") - and you have the recipe for the ruination of the university, just as you have the recipe for the ruination of everything else American corporatism touches. These programs are sold as advertising - which is insane. Seriously. If you want to compete for students, then make sure your students have fulfilling and/or lucrative careers (whichever your students are optimizing for) - don't sell them on which college is fun. You do that, you're not going to get quality students - and that means low-quality end product, a failing reputation in the job market, and you'll end up having to pay even more for a president who says he can fix it all. Wash, rinse, and repeat.
dbg31415 13y ago
Sports also serve to keep alumni connected to the school, and thus increase donations. You can't justify "student athletes" as having any value to the community other than entertainment, but from a fundraising and marketing perspective they've got some uses.
- gambogi 13y ago
  I understand where you're coming from, but you have to remember that student athletes are also people, and members of the community. I could walk you through the argument about physical fitness and the value of exercise, but I'll save you the time. Just step down from that absolute up there.
- acjohnson55 13y ago
  A huge amount of this donation money goes right back to the athletic department though. It's a vicious cycle.
mehwoot 13y ago
The thing is, it's mostly the smaller university athletics departments that take the losses. Of the top 40 public university athletic departments (by expenditure), only 5.2% of income is from University subsidies. The top 10 receive only 1.2% of their income from subsidies. The rest is from ticket revenue, direct donations, TV deals, etc (usually with football heavily subsidizing the other sports). For all 227 Division I athletic departments of public universities, subsidies provide 30% of the overall budget, other revenue 70%. So when people complain about this issue, it really probably isn't any of the universities that they think it is. Check it out yourself: http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/sports/college/story/2012-05-14/ncaa-college-athletics-finances-database/54955804/1 http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/sports/college/story/2012-05-...
fooyc 13y ago
Is "and" banned from headline titles? Does this punctuation make sense for native english speaking people? "Athletics cost colleges, students millions" Does it mean that "Athletics cost colleges" and "students cost millions" ? Or do every english people find this phrase very clear on first read?
- w1ntermute 13y ago
  This sort of abbreviation is commonly found in headlines. "and" isn't banned, it's just that this is acceptable too.
ksk 13y ago
Hmm, have they calculated the secondary markets that athletics generates? As a CS person I believe that computing/CS is largely irrelevant (like much of science) unless someone, somewhere is making money from its applications. Also keep in mind that non-athletes also end up benefiting. At a coarse level - (in strictly discretionary spending) - people buy tickets, misc gear, subscribe to the internet/cable, purchase large screen TV's to watch games, etc. Sports is a great common uniting activity for the masses. Geeks/Engineer types get hired to work on shopping websites, ticketing backend systems, payment gateways, wireless HD video chipsets and whatnot. Even Google who hires all the 'academics' puts them to work so someone somewhere can click a button to buy something while watching a YouTube video (probably sports related :P)
khitchdee 13y ago
I think its great that American Universities place such a great emphasis on sports. It's really good for the athletes and it's raised the standards of American collegiate athletics to Olympic standards. For this reason American Universities become aspirational destinations for high school athletes all around the world. Why is this bad?
- JoeAltmaier 13y ago
  Because colleges are supposed to be about something else - skills, education. Sports has taken a disproportional share of the money and attention.
  - khitchdee 13y ago
    Who is going to produce the worlds best athletes if the colleges stop their supposedly disproportionate spending on athletics? Athletics standards would go down if they did that. I think athletics has an equally significant role to play in life as mind training and memorization. To be a good coach and to learn athletics requires a lot of skill and a lot of discipline both qualities that the education system is trying to inculcate anyways.
    - JoeAltmaier 13y ago
      True but irrelevant to 99% of the students at any given college. Only the best in their sport get the attention and training. The rest of us look on, maybe cheer them on, then go back to our shabby classrooms and underpaid teaching assistants and try to learn something useful.
      - khitchdee 13y ago
        That means standards are really high so you're spending disproportionate amounts of money to train the cream of the crop. Most universities have programs for the casual sportsman. From a practical perspective, even thinking about sports or watching it is useful because it helps balance you out. Having trained as an athlete is like any other training, like a monk meditating or a more academic student going deep into their subject.
bane 13y ago
On some level, college sports programs exist to train students how to be professional sportspeople (which includes things like becoming a professional middle school sports coach). No different, conceptually, than any other major. The fact that supply far outstrips demand just means lots of college sports students end up doing different jobs out of school, just like a creative writing major might end up working in an unrelated field. But sports are weird and mysterious to me. They seem to integrate so strongly into people's identities that they're willing to overlook any number of rational issues with them. At times it becomes downright bizarre and cultish - Penn State football. I think sports are mildly interesting, but nowhere interesting enough to have the esteemed place of prominence that it has in the educational system. When I was growing up, I studied in my school's music program, and I remember attending many school board meetings where we had to justify our existence to receive any funding at all. We squeaked by with a combination of reducing budget, bake sales, corporate donations and a teacher going unpaid for a semester. And there were other challenges, ancient equipment, incomplete scores and no money to buy more (outfitting a 100 piece orchestra with music to read off of is very expensive) and on and on. We got very good at fundraising. Meanwhile the school sports teams got new uniforms for free every season (music kids had to either provide their own instruments or rent them from the school), equipment was mostly new, regular morning announcements let people know about sporting related events, the school newspaper was 40-50% dedicated to the sports teams and students were forced en masse to attend rallies for the sports team in the middle of the academic day. When I was there my 30 year old school got a new state of the art stadium that occupied several acres of school property. They claimed it was to support all of the students, but it was only ever used for sporting events. Support to the music program? Not once in middle or high school was an upcoming music program event mentioned on the morning announcements, and only one time that I can recall did the school paper mention a music program -- it was to let everybody know that an exchange program hosted by the music program was underway and we were about to have a bunch of foreign students attending classes with us. Students were encouraged to make nice nice with the foreign kids and invite them to sporting events to make them feel welcome. When my school's orchestra won a prestigious national competition it was never announced and the trophy we won wasn't allowed to mix with the sports trophies in the school's trophy case. So it sat in the music teacher's office, which was a converted janitorial room. Our yearbooks had 30 pages dedicated to action shots for the school's sports teams, the music program (4 orchestras, 3 bands and 2 choirs) had to jam onto one page. Our national win was cut in editing. Like most high schools the cheerleaders and football players were minor celebrities able to get away with any number of school infractions including physical violence and property destruction against music program kids and their instruments. I hated school sports teams. One of the reasons I went to the college I went to was that it had no well known sports team and the President of the college refused to fund a stronger sports program citing research like the OPs that it was a waste of money for the schools. Our sports arena was more likely to be used for circus performances and concerts than basketball or hockey. I agreed with his stance and secretly enjoyed watching the sports program kids learning how to raise equipment funds and fight for notice like the arts kids had to do. And then he retired, his replacement poured money into the sports program and in a couple of years one of them made it into a national tournament. The sports program exploded, new teams were added, sports pavilions were added, practice fields were cut out of wooded parts of the campus. I hated that once again, sports were finding this kind of irrational support. And then...almost overnight my school went from being a virtually unknown to the largest one in the state with individual schools getting ranked in the top 10 in the country. Money and endowments started flooding in, new performing arts centers, science, tech and R&D buildings started construction. Entire new dormitory blocks sprang up. Two, all new, state of the art sports centers opened up and were opened to the local community. Why? The school president was able to spin the sports teams success into money raising (fund raising, donations, loans) opportunities to invest in every other aspect of the school. So...I think I learned a powerful lesson. Sure sports look like a parasite on schools, sucking out way more then they appear to immediately return. But used as a tool, the new president was able to benefit the entire school in ways his predecessor could never have dreamed of. So yeah, I feel a sense of school pride, and while it's not about the sports teams, I have to recognize that it's because of the sports teams.
greenyoda 13y ago
"Nearly every university loses money on sports." That overly broad statement was made without citing any evidence. The handful of anecdotes that follow don't support the claim of "nearly every university". If there were any studies that support this claim, the author should have cited them. Otherwise, we just have to assume that they're making it up.
- jackmaney 13y ago
  If only there were some kind of engines that could power searches for such information. Oh, wait.... "The latest annual update to USA Today’s mammoth database on revenue and expenses at institutions in Division I of the National Collegiate Athletic Association notes that just 22 athletic departments are operating in the black. Spending across the 227 public universities for which USA Today could gather data rose by $267 million from a year earlier." http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/05/16/texas-tops-money-making-athletic-departments http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/05/16/texas-to... And that's just Division I. Care to make an argument that football teams in either of Divisions II or III are cash cows?
  - greenyoda 13y ago
    Yeah, I know how to use Google too, but it should be the author's responsibility to back up his assertion with facts, not the reader's. Making an unsupported claim like this is the sign of lazy journalism. Division I schools probably have much higher expenses (more and better paid coaches, more spending on stadiums and other infrastructure, more perks for the players, etc.), so it's not immediately obvious whether they're actually more profitable than the other divisions. Economics is full of surprises.

26 points by anu_gupta 13y ago

I hope this article doesn't get passed around very much - it's terrible. How can you have a discussion on athletic spending without mentioning revenue at all!

Zaechie7 13y ago
Did you read the article? "Nearly every university loses money on sports. Even after private donations and ticket sales, they fill the gap by tapping students paying tuition or state taxpayers." Personally, I don't understand this US college sports thing at all.
- arbitrage 13y ago
  gambling on college sports is a huge secondary black market, with many billions of dollars changing hands every year. that should clarify the popularity of US college sports.

VeejayRampay 13y ago

Athletics are also premium advertisement for a university. A quick example: I'm from France and I'd never have heard from Gonzaga weren't it for John Stockton. That in itself has tremendous value, for big or small universities. It can put you on the map.

Zaechie7 13y ago
Like sports successes (especially of individual players) have anything to do with their education and/or research quality.
- VeejayRampay 13y ago
  Of course it doesn't. I'm just saying all the money invested in those sport teams are not 100% money down the drain. They're sometimes a good investment.
  - VLM 13y ago
    > They're sometimes a good investment. Has it benefited them, or you, or anyone else, in any way? I suspect not. Have to be careful about the definition of good. Or the definition of investment. Although no one will admit to being "that guy", everyone personally is certain that everyone else is "that guy" who makes decisions based on (insert disparaged subject). There is some minimal level of startup lesson in that actually being useful is unnecessary; only a perception is necessary.
  - acjohnson55 13y ago
    I have to disagree with you there. It's a zero-sum game. College athletics aren't significantly expanding the national pool of college students. Without them, colleges could use much more mundane, direct (read: far cheaper) forms of advertisement. In most cases, athletics programs are public money and tuition money being poured on something with absolutely minimal academic merit.
    - jasonlotito 13y ago
      > In most cases, athletics programs are public money and tuition money being poured on something with absolutely minimal academic merit. That's not true. In "most" cases, athletics programs do not provide tuition at all, and most student athletes do not receive anything in terms of tuition reimbursement. In most cases, students are still paying all the tuition and still are required to maintain their academic standings. Because of this, a good program can attract out of state students, who will generally pay more out of pocket precisely because they are out of state. Finally, lumping all sports together and claiming they are a waste of money ignores the reality that all sports are not created equal. Sure, adding a football stadium will be expensive, but counting that against the cross-country team is silly.

natejenkins 13y ago

And this is without paying the athletes, who should be earning their market value. Students walk around campus wearing their favorite player's jersey and said player gets nothing more than a scholarship out of the deal. I'm however surprised to hear that football isn't a big moneymaker for universities. I remember being told that Kentucky, a famous place for basketball, makes more off of football, and a quick search seems to confirm that: http://kykernel.com/2012/09/17/less-funding-could-hurt-uk-football/ http://kykernel.com/2012/09/17/less-funding-could-hurt-uk-fo... Kentucky made $18 million off of football for 2012-2013, while making only $8 million off of its wildly popular basketball program. All other sports combined lost $11.6 million. Still a pretty nice little profit. Maybe their math is a bit different.

VLM 13y ago
Depends if you define "moneymaker" as revenue or profit and how wide of a range you're willing to spread the small number of net positives over. The only relevant startup lesson I can see in this story, is its the same old pattern where entrenched interests have a huge financial stake in growing, and no opposition exists, resulting in the eventual death or disability of the host. Its the cancer lifecycle. As a design pattern, it kills businesses (like universities... or startups) just as well as it kills people. Anytime money flows out, have to find some force to oppose it, or inevitably all the money will eventually flow out that direction. That's what makes it very weird that they specifically selected a fifth year senior in an entrepreneurship program, of all things, to quote. Someone in marketing? Sure. Someone in phys therapy? Sure. Someone in "newscasting/communications"? Sure. But an entrepreneur of all people has the very least resources to be drilling unpatchable holes in his new companies money bucket.
fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
>And this is without paying the athletes, who should be earning their market value. Wait a minute. I'll agree that student athletes ought to be paid something, the current arrangement is exploitation. But I'm not sure that starting a athlete salary arms-race is the answer. And what about students who (end up) contributing disproportionately through research & development (patents, and patent licensing)? >I'm however surprised to hear that football isn't a big moneymaker for universities. Isn't everyone? Someone finally addressed the myth that pouring money into athletics is like buying golden egg laying geese. Good.

jackmaney 13y ago

And in other news: water is wet. Also, that big, yellow-orange ball in the sky keeps us warm. More at 11.

UweSchmidt 13y ago

The article starts with "College sports create undeniable campus pride and identity" and leaves this sentence unquestioned, as if it was a positive thing. Regardless of the money spent (or made, if college sports could be run profitable somehow), there seems to be a huge cost for society by setting the focus on the wrong things. It seems that being a good student is valued highly by society, but the shortcut - becoming a (sports) star is even better! This leads to a large percentage of young people investing significant resources (time, energy, health) into this dream. Professional sports is just entertainment, and assuming that the enjoyment comes from a relative comparison between players and teams, or the delta between two rather abstract numbers (this performance, compared to a "record"), then it seems that there are some resources not spent well. I cannot see how sports and educations should be married the way they are at american colleges. Anyone?

cafard 13y ago
I think that at a visceral level we are uncomfortable with education--it is undemocratic, anti-egalitarian, hierarchical--and are happiest when we can turn it into something else: a sports program, a jobs program, daycare. On the other hand, I suppose it does serve as advertising. Probably a lot more people know of Stanford because of its occasionally excellent football and basketball teams than know of it because of what it has done for computing.
- guard-of-terra 13y ago
  "education--it is undemocratic, anti-egalitarian, hierarchical" That does not have to be a innate property of education. It's just how science education seems to work, and other education mock science education. Not saying it's the wrong mode for science education, but.
- bayesianhorse 13y ago
  How is education undemocratic? Just because it's a good idea to defer some decisions or evaluations to people who actually know their stuff, does not mean that individual rights are in danger.
- 13y ago

coldcode 13y ago

I wish I could start a tech focused university without any sports at all. Be interesting to see what happened.

iliis 13y ago
This seems to be the norm here in Europe. Our university does have a very diverse offer of sports activities (everything from running, dancing, boxing or paragliding to jazz and waterboarding), but it is more a hobby-thingie and doesn't touch normal study-life at all.
- itsbonczek 13y ago
  True, but there's a pretty good chance that you have a local football club to root for. College athletics is the American equivalent of that.
  - johnchristopher 13y ago
    No, really. Our equivalent is much less hyped and attended and players are rarely university or college students. Most don't have any HS degree and are "international" or at least "inter-city player".
    - brudgers 13y ago
      I think you missed the basis of comparison. In the US, the role of local sports team is largely filled by scholastic sports programs - i.e. small towns in the US turn out on Friday nights to root for the local high school football (American) team in 8000 seat stadiums in part because there are no significant second and third and fourth division professional sports teams. The public land grant universities tend to fill a similar role at the regional level due to the geographic expanse of the US relative to European countries - e.g. Alabama is about the size of England as a catchment area. It might be argued that the US minor league baseball system maps onto the European football pyramid model - but it is probably a mistake. Unlike the lower tiers of the footballing pyramid which tend to consist of independent teams which sell players on for profit, minor league baseball consists almost entirely of developmental teams affiliated with major league franchises and have their rosters and lineups and substitution patterns dictated from above rather than in the interest of points on the scoreboard or standings.

Tichy 13y ago

No idea why athletics is bundled with colleges, but I would guess those expenses count as advertising?

tpainton 13y ago

Baseball did it right with minor leagues. Football needs to follow. College should not be a minor league football franchise.

acjohnson55 13y ago
I'm not sure baseball can be held up as a model, given that the minor leagues are "minor" because they are under the boot of the MLB, due to the antitrust exemption [1]. Also, it's noteworthy that college baseball does exist and it goes deep into the summer. Pro basketball has an official minor league, the NBA D-League, but college basketball is still out of control. [1] http://www.beyondtheboxscore.com/2008/12/3/678134/the-history-of-baseball-s http://www.beyondtheboxscore.com/2008/12/3/678134/the-histor...

Vivtek 13y ago

College sports undeniably have their benefits, creating university pride and an identity that no philosophy or classics program will ever match. Right there is the failure of the American experiment.

jseliger 13y ago
Colleges have always changed shape and form, and today they've grown into what Clark Kerr calls the "Multiversity" in The Uses of the University (http://www.amazon.com/The-Uses-University-Essentials-Government/dp/0674005325 http://www.amazon.com/The-Uses-University-Essentials-Governm...), which is worth reading if you're interested in such issues. Beyond that, philosophy and classics are interesting citations because the healthy, important parts of philosophy have mostly been shucked into science (http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html, or William James's Pragmatism) and classics are interesting but the corpus is static; it is not easy to come up with new and interesting things to say about The Iliad In 1946, I'm sure someone was writing about the decline of theology and Latin and lamenting the failure of the American experiment. (Despite what I wrote above I am still against the giving of scholarships for sports and think that the pro sports run by big-deal programs should be treated as professions, which they are by any reasonable standard of the word).
- Vivtek 13y ago
  It's not the reference to philosophy and the classics I meant - it's actually the decline of academics in general in favor of Reality College, and it's not new. I regard the specific mention of philosophy and the classics as a sort of fusty stand-in for all the other academics. Add to that the "running the university like a business" - which generally means jacking up CEO pay into the stratosphere while cranking the productivity screws on adjuncts and raising prices for the customers (which in an earlier world were "students") - and you have the recipe for the ruination of the university, just as you have the recipe for the ruination of everything else American corporatism touches. These programs are sold as advertising - which is insane. Seriously. If you want to compete for students, then make sure your students have fulfilling and/or lucrative careers (whichever your students are optimizing for) - don't sell them on which college is fun. You do that, you're not going to get quality students - and that means low-quality end product, a failing reputation in the job market, and you'll end up having to pay even more for a president who says he can fix it all. Wash, rinse, and repeat.

dbg31415 13y ago

Sports also serve to keep alumni connected to the school, and thus increase donations. You can't justify "student athletes" as having any value to the community other than entertainment, but from a fundraising and marketing perspective they've got some uses.

gambogi 13y ago
I understand where you're coming from, but you have to remember that student athletes are also people, and members of the community. I could walk you through the argument about physical fitness and the value of exercise, but I'll save you the time. Just step down from that absolute up there.
acjohnson55 13y ago
A huge amount of this donation money goes right back to the athletic department though. It's a vicious cycle.

mehwoot 13y ago

The thing is, it's mostly the smaller university athletics departments that take the losses. Of the top 40 public university athletic departments (by expenditure), only 5.2% of income is from University subsidies. The top 10 receive only 1.2% of their income from subsidies. The rest is from ticket revenue, direct donations, TV deals, etc (usually with football heavily subsidizing the other sports). For all 227 Division I athletic departments of public universities, subsidies provide 30% of the overall budget, other revenue 70%. So when people complain about this issue, it really probably isn't any of the universities that they think it is. Check it out yourself: http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/sports/college/story/2012-05-14/ncaa-college-athletics-finances-database/54955804/1 http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/sports/college/story/2012-05-...

fooyc 13y ago

Is "and" banned from headline titles? Does this punctuation make sense for native english speaking people? "Athletics cost colleges, students millions" Does it mean that "Athletics cost colleges" and "students cost millions" ? Or do every english people find this phrase very clear on first read?

w1ntermute 13y ago
This sort of abbreviation is commonly found in headlines. "and" isn't banned, it's just that this is acceptable too.

ksk 13y ago

Hmm, have they calculated the secondary markets that athletics generates? As a CS person I believe that computing/CS is largely irrelevant (like much of science) unless someone, somewhere is making money from its applications. Also keep in mind that non-athletes also end up benefiting. At a coarse level - (in strictly discretionary spending) - people buy tickets, misc gear, subscribe to the internet/cable, purchase large screen TV's to watch games, etc. Sports is a great common uniting activity for the masses. Geeks/Engineer types get hired to work on shopping websites, ticketing backend systems, payment gateways, wireless HD video chipsets and whatnot. Even Google who hires all the 'academics' puts them to work so someone somewhere can click a button to buy something while watching a YouTube video (probably sports related :P)

khitchdee 13y ago

I think its great that American Universities place such a great emphasis on sports. It's really good for the athletes and it's raised the standards of American collegiate athletics to Olympic standards. For this reason American Universities become aspirational destinations for high school athletes all around the world. Why is this bad?

JoeAltmaier 13y ago
Because colleges are supposed to be about something else - skills, education. Sports has taken a disproportional share of the money and attention.
- khitchdee 13y ago
  Who is going to produce the worlds best athletes if the colleges stop their supposedly disproportionate spending on athletics? Athletics standards would go down if they did that. I think athletics has an equally significant role to play in life as mind training and memorization. To be a good coach and to learn athletics requires a lot of skill and a lot of discipline both qualities that the education system is trying to inculcate anyways.
  - JoeAltmaier 13y ago
    True but irrelevant to 99% of the students at any given college. Only the best in their sport get the attention and training. The rest of us look on, maybe cheer them on, then go back to our shabby classrooms and underpaid teaching assistants and try to learn something useful.
    - khitchdee 13y ago
      That means standards are really high so you're spending disproportionate amounts of money to train the cream of the crop. Most universities have programs for the casual sportsman. From a practical perspective, even thinking about sports or watching it is useful because it helps balance you out. Having trained as an athlete is like any other training, like a monk meditating or a more academic student going deep into their subject.

bane 13y ago

On some level, college sports programs exist to train students how to be professional sportspeople (which includes things like becoming a professional middle school sports coach). No different, conceptually, than any other major. The fact that supply far outstrips demand just means lots of college sports students end up doing different jobs out of school, just like a creative writing major might end up working in an unrelated field. But sports are weird and mysterious to me. They seem to integrate so strongly into people's identities that they're willing to overlook any number of rational issues with them. At times it becomes downright bizarre and cultish - Penn State football. I think sports are mildly interesting, but nowhere interesting enough to have the esteemed place of prominence that it has in the educational system. When I was growing up, I studied in my school's music program, and I remember attending many school board meetings where we had to justify our existence to receive any funding at all. We squeaked by with a combination of reducing budget, bake sales, corporate donations and a teacher going unpaid for a semester. And there were other challenges, ancient equipment, incomplete scores and no money to buy more (outfitting a 100 piece orchestra with music to read off of is very expensive) and on and on. We got very good at fundraising. Meanwhile the school sports teams got new uniforms for free every season (music kids had to either provide their own instruments or rent them from the school), equipment was mostly new, regular morning announcements let people know about sporting related events, the school newspaper was 40-50% dedicated to the sports teams and students were forced en masse to attend rallies for the sports team in the middle of the academic day. When I was there my 30 year old school got a new state of the art stadium that occupied several acres of school property. They claimed it was to support all of the students, but it was only ever used for sporting events. Support to the music program? Not once in middle or high school was an upcoming music program event mentioned on the morning announcements, and only one time that I can recall did the school paper mention a music program -- it was to let everybody know that an exchange program hosted by the music program was underway and we were about to have a bunch of foreign students attending classes with us. Students were encouraged to make nice nice with the foreign kids and invite them to sporting events to make them feel welcome. When my school's orchestra won a prestigious national competition it was never announced and the trophy we won wasn't allowed to mix with the sports trophies in the school's trophy case. So it sat in the music teacher's office, which was a converted janitorial room. Our yearbooks had 30 pages dedicated to action shots for the school's sports teams, the music program (4 orchestras, 3 bands and 2 choirs) had to jam onto one page. Our national win was cut in editing. Like most high schools the cheerleaders and football players were minor celebrities able to get away with any number of school infractions including physical violence and property destruction against music program kids and their instruments. I hated school sports teams. One of the reasons I went to the college I went to was that it had no well known sports team and the President of the college refused to fund a stronger sports program citing research like the OPs that it was a waste of money for the schools. Our sports arena was more likely to be used for circus performances and concerts than basketball or hockey. I agreed with his stance and secretly enjoyed watching the sports program kids learning how to raise equipment funds and fight for notice like the arts kids had to do. And then he retired, his replacement poured money into the sports program and in a couple of years one of them made it into a national tournament. The sports program exploded, new teams were added, sports pavilions were added, practice fields were cut out of wooded parts of the campus. I hated that once again, sports were finding this kind of irrational support. And then...almost overnight my school went from being a virtually unknown to the largest one in the state with individual schools getting ranked in the top 10 in the country. Money and endowments started flooding in, new performing arts centers, science, tech and R&D buildings started construction. Entire new dormitory blocks sprang up. Two, all new, state of the art sports centers opened up and were opened to the local community. Why? The school president was able to spin the sports teams success into money raising (fund raising, donations, loans) opportunities to invest in every other aspect of the school. So...I think I learned a powerful lesson. Sure sports look like a parasite on schools, sucking out way more then they appear to immediately return. But used as a tool, the new president was able to benefit the entire school in ways his predecessor could never have dreamed of. So yeah, I feel a sense of school pride, and while it's not about the sports teams, I have to recognize that it's because of the sports teams.

greenyoda 13y ago

"Nearly every university loses money on sports." That overly broad statement was made without citing any evidence. The handful of anecdotes that follow don't support the claim of "nearly every university". If there were any studies that support this claim, the author should have cited them. Otherwise, we just have to assume that they're making it up.

jackmaney 13y ago
If only there were some kind of engines that could power searches for such information. Oh, wait.... "The latest annual update to USA Today’s mammoth database on revenue and expenses at institutions in Division I of the National Collegiate Athletic Association notes that just 22 athletic departments are operating in the black. Spending across the 227 public universities for which USA Today could gather data rose by $267 million from a year earlier." http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/05/16/texas-tops-money-making-athletic-departments http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/05/16/texas-to... And that's just Division I. Care to make an argument that football teams in either of Divisions II or III are cash cows?
- greenyoda 13y ago
  Yeah, I know how to use Google too, but it should be the author's responsibility to back up his assertion with facts, not the reader's. Making an unsupported claim like this is the sign of lazy journalism. Division I schools probably have much higher expenses (more and better paid coaches, more spending on stadiums and other infrastructure, more perks for the players, etc.), so it's not immediately obvious whether they're actually more profitable than the other divisions. Economics is full of surprises.