While we're talking about affirmative action, legacy admissions, and college athletic scholarships, here's something that most US folks won't agree with (yet), but that is the only thing that makes sense:
College sports athletic scholarships should be abolished. All of them.
They do much more harm than good. They don't make college accessible for poorest athletes. They make it less accessible.
A scholarship is only worth ~$40K a year of tuition. But it prevents you from earning over $100K?
And as folks now see (and as Black folk have been trying to tell people for years) you get more admissions assistance for being rich than you do for being an athlete.🤷🏿♂️
So it's still better to let athletes earn, and donate their way to an undeserved seat at college. 🤡
Playing college sports is a job. That job can take up to 40 hrs a week. Working 40 hrs a week for $36K, is the same as being a short order cook at the Waffle House. Seriously. Cooking 40 hrs at Waffle House earns you ~$36K.
@mekkaokereke And how much revenue do colleges with massive football or baseball programs reap from the efforts of their “sports team students”? Out of proportion isn’t it?
Athlete admission rates look much higher than they really are, because athletes don't apply until they are guaranteed a spot.
Coach: Son, we like the way you dunk on people!
Athlete: Thanks! I like dunking on people!
Coach: We have 1 scholarship for a center at UNC. We want to offer it to you!
Athlete: I'm deciding between UNC and UCLA...
Coach: Choose us!
Athlete: OK!
Coach: OK you're in! You just need to graduate high school with no disciplinary issues, and a C average!
The 20% of athletes that don't get in, are the 20% that couldn't maintain whatever the criteria was. For Harvard it might be "B+ average, 1300 SAT."
There are extensive conversations between coaches, parents, and athletes, before they commit to a university.
UNC tried to offer a 13 year old girl (soccer phenom) admission to UNC. If she had accepted, she would have been given the exact GPA and SAT score she would have had to hit before she even applied years later.
@mekkaokereke@charles_ex arguing with that number to be well diversed is not OK. Can't remember absolutes but it really showed the flaws if you want to see and understand
If a college wants to transfer $36K of value to an athlete (employee), then let them pay the athlete and do all of the things that other employers are required to do:
@mekkaokereke as an immigrant who likes sports from a country that loves sports but also isn't insane about college sports, I say this with certainty and conviction:
@mekkaokereke any thoughts on nuance depending on the sport? I agree that athletes in the major sports are getting a raw deal, especially compared to their earning potential as a professional (and the value they bring in to the program) but it's less clear for minor sports where the earning potential isn't there.
Maybe something like a wage, lifetime healthcare, profit sharing, and deferrable scholarship would be more equitable?
@mekkaokereke@dondelelcaro Colleges do not give sports scholarships to help the athletes, even of “minor” sports. They do it to raise their prestige and earn money. If a sport doesn’t earn those, they don’t give scholarships. The athletes who earn money and prestige for a school should be compensated accordingly. You might earn less for playing soccer or swimming than for football, but the overall benefits should be the same.
@queenofnewyork@mekkaokereke I'm thinking about nuance around abolishing scholarships for minor sports, where the direct value to the university might be equal to or less than the "value" of the scholarship. (Thinking about women's sports, division 2/3 programs, or athletes who are not good enough to play professionally.) Do scholarships in these programs increase equity or should they all just go away?
Scholarships in these areas decrease equity, and they should all go away.
One important factor: Most of the sports scholarships in the US are for white athletes (~61%) on non-revenue generating teams. 🤷🏿♂️
It's a uniquely American notion that it might somehow be "fair" to take revenue away from the Black kids in the revenue generating sports, to pay for the white kids who tend to come from families with a net worth ~10 times Black families. Not a typo.
Another factor: if a team is non-revenue generating, then it doesn't need to be treated the same way as a revenue generating sport.
The Chicago Bulls are a pro basketball team. They have to pay their employees. The Bulls could form a recreational softball team, composed of its employees. No one would expect them to get paid. They could even play against the White Sox recreational softball team!
But if the Bulls started putting those games on TV and selling them?
@mekkaokereke what is the point of being paid college tuition, if you are busy working an exhausting full time job? It seems to me like the value of the "scholarship" is substantially lower than tuition.
I don’t like the whole college sports thing we do here. Most colleges have rec leagues for students who enjoy the activity and that’s great. Why not stop there?
Some will say that I’d be depriving poor kids the chance at a college education. It doesn’t have to be that way. We could make college free for anyone who keeps their grades up, and lack of athletic talent wouldn’t stand in anyone’s way.
@mekkaokereke Agreed but how did college sports become such a money cow anyways? Someone had to think of the idea to use "free" workers to play sports so they could sell it... 🤔 🤑
@mekkaokereke
After spending ten years studying on campuses and another twenty working on them, my opinion is to entirely get rid of the competitive sports out of the colleges and make them community teams if there's interest enough in keeping them at all.
Totally. Baseball appears to work fine with the minor league/major league system. And European soccer also seems to be getting by without college involvement. I've never understood why basketball and football couldn't do the same.
@williampietri@mekkaokereke
Exactly right, collegiate sports is a huge subsidy that taxpayers give to the NFL and NBA, not really sure about the NHL.
Soccer used to also be subsidized, but now every MLS team has their own schools they've built and funded for their development of players since that works to provide better athletes.
@mekkaokereke@williampietri@GreenFire - It makes so much money for the large universities. Just had a friend tell me their daughter is choosing between Alabama, Georgia or Clemson because…football. We live in CA. Out of state recruitment of students is likely a small monetary incentive for these schools but football is an incentive for some students.
@patmikemid@mekkaokereke@williampietri
In 39 of the 50 US states, the highest-paid public employee is a university coach. This is based on data collected by 24/7 Wall Street. In total, 28 college football coaches and 12 college hoops coaches are the best-paid employees in their states.
@mekkaokereke I totally agree with this. Especially since the degree is often treated as a joke, because it’s unlikely the athletes are able to spend enough time outside of training and playing to truly learn the material.
Seeing soccer players in their late teens making debuts in English Premier League games probably did away with the last shreds of any resistance to the idea I had. There are under-21 teams there, where we have college teams. Their players get paid, ours don’t.
@mekkaokereke And that is completely unfair before you even start talking about the fact that it’s largely young black men being put through the college sports meat grinder. The schools earn way more money than they pay in scholarships. It’s abusive and it needs to stop.
Yup. Since we got the NIL laws passed, we're seeing more athletes graduate from college. Because they're not in artificial poverty, so don't have to try to get to the pros ASAP.
We're seeing more equity in funding between men's and women's sports. Because "no one watches women's sports" has always been a lie.
We're seeing less exploitation of athletes. Because athletes have more options, agency, and representation.
@mekkaokereke
One can hardly blame guys in tough circumstances hoping for sports scholarships (try early Tom Cruise film All The Right Moves-I played H.S. football vs guys like this, motivated to escape Pittsburgh area mill towns).
BUT ~1980 at dinner with 3 Black women, all smart, capable professionals (AT&T), they bemoaned relative scarcity of similar Black guys, saying of course many were in prison, but also lure of big$$ in NFL/NBA siphoned off too many into areas where very few succeed.
@mekkaokereke college sports while not only bringing in all the money associated with commercialized sports, also has a big influence on fund raising, specifically from alumni. Going to be difficult to ask universities to give up that golden goose.
I should be crystal clear about this point: I'm not "asking" colleges to give up anything. Because I don't believe that equity and justice are ever given. They are taken, reluctantly. We didn't "ask" for NIL, or athletes' rights to be respected.
Colleges make so much money from sports, because the revenues for college sports are similar to other pro leagues, but they make the Black kids play for free.
I agree with your statement if not necessarily your reasons :)
Athletic scholarships should be abolished because I feel that they over-emphasize participation in competitive rather than cooperative activities. Like, yes, most sports are both... but more often than not, the part that is considered important isn't how well the team gels but how well they do at beating other teams.
I feel like our national emphasis on competition in all things is a big part of the nation's issues.
I played sports at a high level (college, semi-pro), and I've done academics at similar levels.
Academics are more cut-throat, much more misogynistic, and less collaborative than sports. There's much more collaboration and teamwork in most sports than in academic environments. High level men athletes respect high level women athletes, more than high level men academics respect and collaborate with high level women academics.
Perhaps it's a difference of community experience then.
My experience has always been that sports were a dividing factor among people, not a unifying one. Teammates competing for standing, schools competing for validation (while ignoring academics and the arts,) and people carrying that same sense of Us Versus Them over into the rest of their lives, whether that be behavior on the job, in politics, or anything else.
It's not the sports I take umbrage with, but the competition.
I kind of feel like you don't like sports / athletes, and are implying a causal relationship between them and what you see as problems in society. As in, if college athletes somehow didn't exist, that these problems would go away, or be lessened.
I don't agree with that viewpoint, but I can see how reasonable folk with less direct, positive experience with athletes might feel that way.
I also see how the amazing toxicity of football in particular leaves very bad impressions.
Athletes in particular tend to not be the issue, honestly. In fact, most often they suffer because of the issues, being denied opportunities to showcase their skills or make careers because the Powers That Be -- athletics associations, coaches, etc. -- would rather push them to burn out than cultivate their abilities.
My issues come from the culture that arises around those athletes' performances, in the fanbase, the industries, the vying for power their "games" represent. 1/2
@mekkaokereke There’s certainly something to be said for moving to a purely needs-based scholarship program, but how large is the population of kids that could pull in $100k? NI&L dollars already overwhelmingly go to that small pool.
No doubt there are men’s football and basketball programs that bring in revenue comparable to professional teams and can absolutely pay their players. How do we handle those ~75 programs in an ocean of programs with comparatively shoestring budgets?
I agree. But let's go further, and just eliminate big money college sports altogether, since they are de-facto professional sports that have no legitimate connection to the academic missions of universities.
Spin off the big money making college sports franchises into actual professional sports teams, a kind of farm league system.
During the transition, the Academic Institutions can be shareholders in these new for profit businesses, and can hold or divest their shares.
@mekkaokereke
Let the teams keep the names and mascots for some transition period (5 years?) while fans adjust.
Eventually the franchises may move out of the University owned facilities, or the University might rent or sell those to the new owners of the franchise.
I am fully aware that none of this is going to happen for a dozen reasons.
But the world would be a better place if it did. Big money sports are toxic to healthy academic institutions.
@mekkaokereke This is definitely a very important point. An athletic scholarship averages out to below minimum wage for the amount worked.
College sports are fundamentally corrupt, exploitative, and degrade the educational experience of many students because their institution will waste millions of dollars in the (usually vain) hope having a good program.
College sports should be small and unencumbered with huge coach salaries, exploited athletes, and wasteful buildings.
One of the things that really pushes my buttons is how people and organizations who want to sell status exposure pretend they are doing something noble like caring about education or athletics or whatever, and then use that as a rationale for exploiting everyone they can bully.
And then the general public tends to eat up those rationalizations like candy.
Colleges and universities are extremely exploitative. To students, faculty, staff, everyone but admin.
@mekkaokereke Amen. Make the NFL and NBA run their own goddamn farm systems on their own dimes. Make maintaining a C+ average at a local state school a requirement of employment if need be, but there should be an iron wall between the teams and the colleges, and the players should be part of the unions from the jump.
@ppatel@mekkaokereke Yeah, that's not gonna happen, especially in the Southern states where Football is basically a religion. How else are you gonna get people to play College sports? Nah, people want and need insentives to work for a whole season and sports does matter in College. It's essentially farming teams for the big leagues.
@mekkaokereke@ppatel How are you going to convince people to change? College sports have been a staple of American culture for decades. Some of the best professional players have come from College sports. This is just gonna make it much harder for people to get into the big leagues.
NIL didn't "ruin" college sports. It made it better. Ratings are up. Gameplay quality is up. Athletes are staying in college longer. There are fewer kids getting injured and thinking back into poverty. There's more money from endorsements.
Paying athletes will not "ruin" college sports either. It will make it better.
Americans seem to forget that other countries enjoy sports too, and seem to do so without exploiting their athletes and keeping them in artificial poverty.
@mekkaokereke@ppatel Yeah but you said something about getting rid of scholarships. paying athletes is cool. I'm all for it but scholarships are super important because College is hella expensive.
Yes, college is expensive. But it doesn't matter. Let me explain.
Which would you rather have:
A college scholarship (worth $36K), but you can't have any job outside of sports, and the college is prohibited from (legally) paying you, even though they want to. If you take money under the table you can go to jail for fraud.
No college scholarship, but you get paid $100K to play sports, (but have to pay $36K tuition). Also, you can have other jobs / endorsements (+$50K)
@gocu54@mekkaokereke Take a look at the whole thread. There are multiple posts discussing this. It will give you a wider view of the issue including scholarships and earning potential.
@gocu54@mekkaokereke Systems don't change unless you employ imagination. Think about the current incentive structures. What would it take to dismantel those structures? The incentives have to be applied in a different place in different ways to accomplish that. Is the popularity of college football there because its college football or is it because it's football?
@mekkaokereke when I first got to the US, I told my teammates in discussions that it was very weird that they only got scholarships but are not getting paid in any way. Everyone tried to justify it one way or the other. I was like, I played in Africa and I was still getting some level of pay as a kid because we knew it was work 😂
@mekkaokereke Umm, in the premier sports, college is better than the minor leagues for development and as a route to a career as a pro (and a better life during). Otherwise, agree.
I'm deeply involved with pro athletes, trainers, coaches, managers, team owners, and more. I can explain for hours how the claim that college prepares athletes better for the pros than other options is at best a misunderstanding, and at worst, an intentional lie promoted by folks that make a lot of money from forcing poor Black kids to go through the "unpaid internship" of US minor league sports.
@mekkaokereke@wndlb I remember when I went to OSU, and during the fall semester you could just see the profound amounts of money rolling into the campus from all over on home games.
Aside from my personal irritation at the obnoxiousness of it all in my living space, the thing I thought about the most is like, what are the athletes getting out of all of this revenue surrounding one game? 1 of their 4 credit calculus class covered?
Multi-billion dollar sports leagues are supposed to pay 50% of their revenue to athletes. But if you can get away with paying less than 2% to the (very poor, very Black) athletes by calling it "athletic scholarships," well, then you get to keep the rest! 🤑
@mekkaokereke For 99+%, I surely agree. I'm just thinking of the pedigree of draft picks: few are from the USFL, several are from 'Bama.
The real deception is how narrow the funnel to a paying job is, compared with, say, the accounting route.
Again, no. That's because the routes to the NFL that don't go through college exploitation, are intentionally closed off.
Much of the time athletes spend in college football, at places like Bama, is spent getting bigger, stronger, and faster. That's the argument for why high school kids can't go straight to the NFL. I've already said on here that college football strength and conditioning coaches don't know anything, and just hurt kids.🤷🏿♂️
Most college athletes would get much better (and safer) Strength and Conditioning training from being a big tech employee than from training at their college. Seriously.
Because the corporate fitness programs at Big Tech companies are run by EXOS. EXOS only does 2 things:
Strength and Conditioning training for corporate employees
Strength and Conditioning training for pro athletes.
They use the same philosophy and expertise for both client bases.
@mekkaokereke No argument from me. The College Athletic Industrial Complex capitalizes on people honey-eyed remembrances of their halcyon college days, turning that into broadcast ad dollars, with no actual interest or concern in the young adults whose lives are upended in the perishingly slim hope that a scholarship will provide real opportunity.
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