It bothers me a bit that when a college basketball coach was in negotiations for a new contract at Georgia State University, he objected to a proposed requirement for a bonus that the team GPA average be at least 2.1. The school is concerned because reportedly, there is a financial penalty imposed upon schools whose athletes fail to meet the standard (the Bill Bradley-Ed Towns Act?). The GSU coach should man up, considering his players are not compensated.
Or… we could make colleges about oh, I don’t know - academics. And stop the BS sham that the 2.1 GPA athletes are students. Either make them pro teams associated with the schools or make the sports just clubs like any other EC and get back to what college is about - what was that again? Oh… academics.
Zipping up flame suit now.
I’ll don my flame suit right alongside you, because I totally agree!
Considering that’s just a squeak above probation at pretty much any school it’s a very low standard to meet. IMO any coach should be doing all he or she can to ensure their players find academic success as well as athletic.
Before this devolves into an athlete bashing thread, I’ll add that a student athlete near and dear to me graduated magna cum laude from Princeton.
I don’t this thread is about bashing athletes, it is about bashing coaches!
Or rather it’s about bashing coaches who don’t sufficiently value academics.
One of my kids spoke with coaches as a potential recruit. A major selling point for us was when coaches talked about the high GPAs their teams had achieved or about the ways in which academics took precedence over athletics.
My comment was about neither the athletes nor the coaches but the flaws in the entire system. The system - pretending a kid with a GPA of 2.1 is a student and putting sports above the academic portions of college - is what creates the problems. Going to a system that puts the emphasis where it belongs, on the academics, eliminates all these problems because there would be no incentive or reward for the cheating, for the money sloshing around, for admitting and propping up people who should not be in college at all. Nobody would question whether the Princeton athlete was there because s/he was smart or because he could throw a ball.
You get what you measure. If you measure athlete GPA you’ll get more athletes in no-show courses, more “tutors” turning in work for the athletes, more pressure on adjuncts to pass athletes to keep their jobs.
I wish that were the case, but once it is known that a student is an athlete, false assumptions are often made.
A student with a 2.1 average can graduate in good standing in many majors, so certainly this person would be a considered a student. It is really an individual choice for athletes and non athletes of how much to study and how much to devote to sports or a job or other pursuits.
The issue isn’t whether an individual student can have a GPA of 2.1 or 2.0, but whether the coach should feel that having the overall average be greater than a 2.1 is his responsibility. A team average of 2.1 should be pretty easy to obtain if the majority of students are doing better than that.
I haven’t been following this story, but this article suggests that the coach’s agent wanted a bonus set for a higher average GPA of 2.5, which is the opposite of what the OP has suggested.
Going from a 2.16 to a 2.5 would be pretty difficult.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution article also says that “Georgia State expressed concerns that the average grade-point average for scholarship men’s basketball players for 2017-18 was projected to be 2.16, a declining trend for the previous years that could lead to a loss of substantial revenue from the NCAA.”
Seems like GSU wants to avoid risking that “loss of substantial revenue from the NCAA”.
Of course those assumptions are made - because the system is set up to encourage those situations and those assumptions. Don’t like people assuming your student athlete is an unqualified dummy? Work to eliminate a system that admits athletes that are unqualified dummies.
The athletes aren’t the problem here; they’re just working within the boundaries of the current system and who can blame them for that? The system is the problem.
I’d be concerned that a quick increase from 2.16 to 2.5 (accompanied by a huge bonus) would create opportunities for academic shenanigans. That is a big increase.
If 2.0 is the requirement, and everyone on the team is meeting that, what’s the problem? There are a lot of student who can’t make the 2.0, and they are suspended or dismissed from school. That applies to the basketball team too, and they can’t play or practice if they don’t have the 2.0 while a non-athlete could remain in school with different consequences.
I can understand the school wanting to put in an incentive for the coach to get the team’s gpa up. I can see the coach not wanting his salary dependent on the team gpa. In this case it seems the coach is interested in raising the gpa.
Most teams have a high gpa than the student body. At my daughter’s school, an engineering school, something like 9 of the 11 women’s sports teams had a gpa team average over 3.5. Their coaches were interested in everyone doing well so that they, the coaches, didn’t have to worry about grades at all. D’s coach knew her grades before she did, knew if she missed class, knew if there were problems brewing. Most athletes need to stay on top of class and lab work because they might miss classes for a game, and if the team makes the playoffs those often happen right at finals time.
The Coach (Bazant is the agent negotiating the contract) wasn’t proposing raising the required gpa average to 2.5 to get bonus, but that he get double the bonus if the gpa rose to 2.5.
I think the coach was planning to leave anyway. He wanted the $300k buyout raised to $2.1 million if they fired him; basically, the school couldn’t fire him. The $25k gpa bonus was peanuts in the contract.