
(AP Photo/Robert Franklin)
The athletic arms race
In my recent book, I link higher education’s misplaced priorities to the explosion of costs associated with intercollegiate athletics and youth sports. This research, along with studies by the Knight Commission, the Drake Group and the Association of Research Libraries, shows that university spending on intercollegiate sports has vastly outpaced spending on instruction and research over the past two decades. This spending spree has led to an arms race, or what sports sociologist Howard Nixon II calls an “athletic trap” that ensnares universities in incessant funding of high-visibility sports programs. Contrary to popular belief, very few college sports programs operate in the black. According to data from the NCAA and U.S. Department of Education, fewer than 25 of the more than 300 NCAA Division I programs earn more than they spend. Athletic department deficits at some schools run upwards of US$20 million per year. Whenever athletic expenses exceed revenues, schools must make up the gap through other means. At state schools, this could include more public funding, although that is becoming quite rare. More likely, schools will try to address the deficit through increasing tuition, implementing generic “student fees” or soliciting alumni for more money.Paying for what, exactly?
On the surface, none of this seems logical. Why pour so many resources into athletic programs? If students end up bearing the financial burden and education programs suffer, where is the return on the investment? More than 100 years ago, sociologist Thorstein Veblen first identified the “corporatization” of higher education, with university presidents as “captains of solvency” who focus their energies on “principles of spectacular publicity” that will impress current and future donors. Not much has changed in the last century. Higher education has become more about cultivating a school’s “brand” than cultivating critical thinkers, more about alumni checkbooks than about student notebooks. Is it any wonder that college presidents are increasingly referred to as CEOs and are being recruited from the corporate world? If we think about college sports as a marketing venture rather than an educational venture, all of this spending makes perfect sense. Think of players as walking advertisements – each branded with the school’s logo – who appear before millions of viewers on ESPN and ABC. Large schools are especially concerned with brand development and revenue streams, which come from a combination of dedicated alumni, fans and corporate sponsors. Meanwhile, smaller Division I schools and Division III schools use athletics not just for brand recognition but to manipulate their enrollment statistics and improve their “selectivity index.” Generally, varsity athletes are admitted through an early decision process that operates somewhat independently from the regular admissions process. But only the regular process figures into calculations of a college’s acceptance rates. Athletes who are admitted early reduce the number of acceptances offered to the regular applicant pool. This lowers the school’s acceptance rate and raises its perceived selectivity – all without any substantive educational improvements. Like their Division I counterparts, Division III schools also believe that visible and successful sports programs will spawn increased alumni contributions. The supporting data for this, however, are mixed. Most schools end up treading water (or slowly sinking) as increased spending doesn’t keep pace with increases in alumni contributions.The empty ‘student-athlete’ slogan
Officially born in 1910, the NCAA has always had trouble balancing its dual mission of promoting and regulating intercollegiate sports. Part of this promotion has been cultivating the “amateur” status of college sports, and how it is “purer” than commercialized professional sports. Nothing represents that marketing scheme better than the “student-athlete” concept. Former NCAA president Walter Byers first coined the term in the 1950s while fighting a worker’s compensation claim by the widow of a college football player who had died during a game. “Student-athlete” has since becoming something of a mantra among those who work at any level within intercollegiate sports.
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