Yeah universities should be about academics. Not sports. In fact, Universities, in my opinion, should just be banned from HAVING sports teams. Do that shit outside of school lmao. You shouldn't be getting ACADEMIC scholarships because you can... "throw ball good".
Counterpoint: universities exist to teach young people to be competent, well rounded members of society, including exposure to quality academics, music, art and sport. If you just want job training, go to trade school; if you just want academics, go to the library.
So before I get into this, know that I'm biased as a colligate sport fan and a former NCAA athlete. But this is a bad take. Sports provide all sorts of benefit both internally and externally for the university. It is true that some athletic budgets are insane, and for what it's worth I agree that the salaries that get paid are insane. But this is simply the price of an arms war. These colleges want the best facilities and coaches. And it's not just for the dick measuring contest, though make no mistake that is absolutely part of it. But all sorts of studies show that general contributions and academic donations in particular increase with athletic team success, notably championship winning teams. People like to belong to a community, and sports fandom is one of the most tried and true sources of community. Plus the tv contacts for the so called revenue sports would make an oil tycoon blush. The presidents of these schools continue to invest in these programs because they continually prove to be an excellent roi. And I firmly believe that these same presidents know more than either of us about running their universities. And all of that is aside from what these sports provide to the most important stakeholders in a college, it's enrollees. Again recognizing my bias here, but the only reason I made it through school to get my 2 degrees that I use professionally was the sports team I trained with. These teams provide structure to the college life, something that can be hard to maintain as you essentially start a new life. Plus, sport and exercise prove to boost academic performance both on the short and long timescale. Most institutions report higher average GPAs in the athletic department than the general population. Ever notice that elite academic institutions also tend to have elite athletic programs? This isnt always obvious as it's often non revenue sports outside of the state schools that are in the aforementioned dick measuring contest. And even schools that aren't know for athletic or academics will still tend to offer intramural sports as again they are a massive boon for the students but I feel like at this point I'm straying from the original point. All in all these athletic programs are good for both the institution as a whole, and those that study at them.
tl;dr Sports good for college
I would agree with you but the statistics are so far out of proportion in America right now. Across the country you have many schools who can barely fund educational departments while continuously increasing sports funding. This happened at my college recently, several times. We lost several history classes due to the football team requiring more budget.
So what you have instead is this awful cycle where they make so much more money from investing in sports than education, so they raise the education prices to fund both. Yet the government is subsidizing or at least fronting the cost for students. So now you have even less pressure to continue being an actual college. They begin to chase sports to the moon at the cost of all else.
Then you have the actual effect of sports players on the college itself where they attend. I know some hard working athletes with legitimate degrees, but those athletes are the first to tell me that the rest of the athletes are there for worthless degrees. So now you have to account for the fact that athletes are an investment in facilities and arenas and departments as well. Further skewing the purposes of the college.
The whole system is beyond broken and colleges shouldn’t have to depend on anything except education costs to survive
there's a lot of things wrong with college sports but kids getting a chance to get higher education that otherwise might not is absolutely not one of them.
Nah, it isn't sport's fault that academics hasn't found a marketable avenue for spectators to appreciate the craft. There needs to be more innovation in competitive aseptic technique or fantasy math league.
Upon reflection, you guys are correct. My opinion has been changed, though it wasn't a comment I put too much thought into. Appreciate your opinion & commentary
atheletics have been a vital part of the education system since schools have been a thing
You are correct. A renaissance person does need to have a physical aspect of their education. Suppose saying that I viewed universities as things that should produce research. Guess that is what research labs are for.
Bad take with no argument to justify it.
Sports are good for universities. Monetarily it's easy to see why, but it's also academically good too. Having sports teams builds a sense of community for the school that will bolster fraternizing between otherwise separate groups of people. This leads to students forming broader webs of connections than they otherwise would, which gives better outcomes after graduation since they know more things about more of the world, which is the point of going to a university.
Football is a PhD and chess is an Olympic sport. Seems fair to me.
I'm just going to tuck this in here: https://fiscal.wa.gov/Staffing/Salaries
It isn't just the highest paid university staff it is often highest paid state employees
Lol some Dr that invented some crazy new health economics in the 90s and has a Harvard economics degree and a real doctor degree and was director of the WHO makes less than like a dozen ball touching people.
This would be far more convincing coming from someone that isn't an evangelical religious nutjob teaching at a school with barely enough students to field an American football team (yes I know it's Australia) much less be competitive in any major sports.
Controversial thesis: if you teach creationism in college as a factual accounting of history, then it's not a university. It's a cult with a side hustle in tertiary education.
A society which charges students to acquire knowledge values neither.
That seems like an Utopian view you're not paying for the knowledge but for the resources to learn and accreditation. Universities, professors, etc don't pay for themselves. Even when University is "free" you are paying it through taxes - which is still fine by me.
I don't agree, though, with the prices practiced in the US, that's just a way of restraining the population. Where I'm from, going to college is not expensive, I cannot fathom having to pay those ridiculous prices.
Paying via taxes is not charging students.
You do not pay taxes based on your use of public education or use of any other public service but based on your income and/or wealth.
If you do not make sufficient income as a student to pay taxes or enough taxes to cover the cost of your education your public education is in fact free to you.
I never claimed education shouldn’t be paid for, nor that resources shouldn’t be applied to its provision, but a society which levels the financial burden on the student is imposing an artificial and indefensible barrier on their collective progress.
Further, education can only be framed as expensive when it is not appropriately valued as the investment it is.
Finally, taxes don’t pay for anything when the funding originates from the issuing entity of a fiat currency.
I'm so sick of this "nOtHiNg is fReE" retort. Yeah, no shit it isn't. Most of us are aware of that. Like others have said, what we mean is taxes should be the means by which we pay for education. Taxes paying for education is not utopian. It exists as a means for paying for education in the USA already, K-12. I personally don't think it is a stretch to change higher education to a tax drive model. Even in a world where it is "free" for the students there will still be people who don't go, so it's not like we have to collect taxes to account for all persons. College is not for everyone. Also if you try to use current college tuition as an excuse for it costing the tax payers too much, I don't want to hear it. It is already well established that higher education costs have balloned faster that other products and services in the market and I think that is a symptom of the stupid profit models of modern universities and colleges. From personal experience at university, you get treated like a line item on there accounting sheets rather than a student and that alone is a huge factor in the enshittification of higher education.
Reminds me of a random quip about how American universities are real estate holding companies with sports team subsidiaries that also, on occasion, also award academic degrees.
I'm pretty sure the football coach is the highest paid state employee since our big university is a state school.
Highest paid public employee not just at the universities but compared to every public employee in the state.
These are the eight where it isn't a football coach as of 2020:edit: screw it couldn't format it to look good
If you live in the southeast, Midwest, or Texas/Oklahoma I can almost guarantee you the head football coach is the highest paid state employee by a considerable margin.
Yup. The highest paid public employees are all big football school coaches
FTFY: then it is not an university, it is an American university.
My university has no sports, nobody has time or energy for that. Best we've got is the bi weekly chess "club" of our Prof for theoretical computer science.
The highest paid high school employees are often the coaches. A lot more money goes into the football than anything else...
football also makes a lot more money than anything else
In the short term at least, yes. But considering American schools get most of their funding based on students' academic performance – and low grades means they get defunded and have to cut things like schoolbuses, supplies, and education programs & quality – it's a very short-sighted thing to do for schools which don't have peak student performance (and most schools overpaying coaches and underpaying teachers don't have good student performance). Not to imply that you were saying that this isn't the case
And that money gets plugged right back into the sports teams. When I was in high school, our theater auditorium where we did our plays was literally falling apart. We had to tape off seat rows that were unusable. But the football team got new locker rooms with jacuzzis in them.
I like that diagnosis. It can be used elsewhere.
If the highest paid person at your software company does not write software then you are not a software company but a sustaining a rich person by exploiting employees' limited time on the planet company.
If the highest paid person at your delivery company does not work as a delivery person then you are not a delivery company but a sustaining a rich person by exploiting employees' limited time on the planet company.
If the highest paid person at your construction company does not build and construct things then you are not a construction company but a sustaining a rich person by exploiting employees' limited time on the planet company.
Huh there is a trend here.
And if you don't have an elite sports team and instead have a multi-billion dollar endowment then you're a hedge fund with a side hustle in tertiary education.
Coach Marty Daniels would agree with you. Classes are bullshit.
Because it's a government position with an extremely noncompetitive salary. The role I'm in right now, that college role's salary is about 40% of that.
You want to know why schools are getting ransomware so frequently?
And that thesis doesn't mean shit.
You gonna downplay my 11 years of blood, sweat, and tears for a PhD because I went to a state school? I'd be happy to prove how much bullshit that is against any ivy League engineer you know.
An Ivy League education is an expensive luxury product for the parents. That way they can brag to their peers about their children. It's well known that the main benefit of an Ivy education is networking. That's because of the connections that the parents have, not because the education is better.
With the exception of maybe Princeton or Columbia, top research isn't coming out of Ivy League schools. And the good research they do have is because they pay the top people more. They don't have smarter students, they just have more resources.
MIT isn't an Ivy. Cal Tech isn't an Ivy. Stanford isn't. UC Berkeley and University of Michigan definitely aren't.
All this tweet is about is that it's bullshit that sports coaches are paid more than educators.
Where does it say any of that?
Nowhere. It could also didn't say (but could have said) any school that participates in the Greek system is just a party network that occasionally gives degrees.
I don't like sports or Greek stuff but I don't like downplaying the quality of academics of an institution even more than that. Lots of us gave a decade or more to the academic parts of those places and it is shitty to write it off as an afterthought to sports or frats or whatever. It tastes bad to read shit like this after paying more student loans than the cost of the house of the person tweeting it, you know?
It's laughable that universities host sports teams, especially with handegg where they're essentially the NFL's farm league. Shows how much (zero) we give a shit about actual education in this fucking country. 99.9999% of college "education" is just like grade school education anyway: spending way too much time on irrelevant subjects (teach the whole curriculum in elementary school, but past that, teach what the student needs to know for his field of study and that's it), and sadly, having most of it be bullshit rote memorization that the student spits out for the test and then forgets it forever. Engage the student, have him learn things intuitively, give examinations that allow for the full range of what we can do as adults (reference materials, internet, other people, etc -- THIS IS NOT CHEATING, THIS IS USING KNOWLEDGE AVAILABLE!) that actually shows what the person is capable of and whether or not they can apply what they learned and what they find out on their own.
No wonder we're so fucked as a society.
This seems inaccurate unless we are considering sums of salaries. If the sports staff makes more than the academic staff this is true. Otherwise your university just sometimes makes bad decisions.
The head coaches typically make 10x the salary of the school pres. they have huge staffs and expensive facilities.
The athletic building in Ann Arbor looks like something NASA would build.
Having graduated and worked for Purdue and NASA, both of these are not the case there. Coaches are 4x president salary, and the training facility (including the new one) doesn't compare to something like the water training astronaut facility at JSC.
Sports facilities are nice, but they come from a different lot of money and are less funded than, for example, the engineering dept.
Edit: to be extra clear, the sentiment of over paying for sports is fine, but for anyone who graduated for a state school like me, you're taking pot shots at my degree. And so while I agree with the sentiment, heartily fuck you if you didn't put in your 11 years of undergrad and grad school at an ivy league university where this isn't true.
