Off-Topic Discussion from "Colleges Crossed Off List or Moved Up After Visiting"

Parents Forum
2041

Sometimes the cure is no better than the disease.

You’re talking about $50 bills, and NIL deals are 6 and 7 figures. They can both be poorly designed programs/rules.

I’ll give you an example (sorry…Rutgers is what I know)…

Rutgers has 2 incoming freshman next year for basketball. They both have NIL deals estimated to be over $600k. They will both be leaving after one season for the NBA, where they are both expected to be lottery picks. This would be the case at any D1 school in the country.

Rutgers students (in 2023) spent $13.5M in “student fees” to support the athletic department (which loses money - $24M at last count).

Call me crazy, but I think it’s wrong for Rutgers students to borrow money so that they can support the guys using the school for 1 year. I don’t care if it’s $1…it’s wrong.

What I would suggest: put in some sort of “inverted FAFSA” process, where students NIL money is applied to their scholarship for recovery. If a student is getting $10k for NIL and a free ride… it’s still free. If someone is making $500k, then they effectively become a “full pay” student. The scale/ratio… I’m sure someone can figure out.

The notion of that schools are “making money” is grossly inflated. A dozen or two make money. Rutgers is losing tens of millions of dollars on athletics, but that doesn’t stop them from flying the field hockey team to Oregon/Washington/LA for games that won’t generate enough revenue to cover meals.

College athletics is broken. The “revenue” narrative is overwhelmingly false, but expecting those who are profiting from the current environment to address the issues is a fools errand.

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2042

Totally agree college athletics is broken.

My focus is on all the college football players, who in the past literally risked their lives and future health for peanuts while schools were making hundreds of millions in television rights. I am 100% for those players getting paid, and paid well. Of course, I think it’s ridiculous that colleges are the feeder league for the pros in the first place.

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2043

Without at all disagreeing with the substance of the critique, I note state university systems at least sometimes seem to believe that popular intercollegiate athletic programs are necessary to continue getting high levels of state funding. And in fact, only a small handful of nichey public colleges don’t have intercollegiate athletics at all.

So again from a consumer choice perspective, usually your options are not going to involve no athletics, but some may be spending more or less on it.

2044

Yes, I was referring to small under the table payments so that D-1 athletes could buy enough food to eat while in school and spending a tremendous number of required hours in their college sport . My example is to point out that athletes worth 7 figure sums didn’t even get enough for food & other expenses while help generating millions in income for their university.

If Rutgers loses money in athletics as a member of the highest paying athletic league in the country, then Rutgers has a business/management problem.

Eliminate big time college athletics, then watch alumni contributions plummet to the point that tuition, fees, room & board rise at an even more dramatic rate, unprofitable academic & sports programs get cancelled, and college facilities deteriorate.

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2045

Very few college athletes make big bucks from NIL. And, very few college athletic programs make money.

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2046

Yes, even in the big conferences, there is the haves and have nots. Rutgers is a have not. The big 10 was foolish to bring in Rutgers. Wealthy Syracuse would have tapped the NY market better for them.

What you may see are schools like Rutgers gut programs outside the major ones…as we’ve seen some schools do already.

D3 is a nice idea. No athletic scholarships…everyone is there for the pure joy of it.

What a nice thought.

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2047

Many engage in D-3 athletics because they were admitted primarily or in large part due to their athletic ability. Many D-3 players quit their sport after a year or two college.

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2048

The Bergen Record published an investigative piece a couple years back that did a deep dive on Rutgers athletics. Link attached but not sure if it is free. It showed massive losses incurred since Rutgers joined the Big 10 in 2014, losing $84 million over six years. The athletic department had to rely on loans from the institution to cover the deficits, thus diverting funds away from students and academic programs. As an NJ resident, it is infuriating that this is allowed. My S23 and D25 would not even consider applying there.

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2049

But the flipside, is Rutgers is now (due to methodology) #40 - and that’s a lot of good pub - and sports didn’t make it, but the notoriety of the big 10 helps it.

But I agree - sports is great for many big conference schools - but not those on the fringes - although they do have more money than they had b4- but likely higher expenses…coaching hires, for example, to stay competitive.

It’s a crap system - but big time sports aren’t going anywhere!!

2050

It’s amazing to me as a European how tied sports is with universities. It took me years to wrap my head over it really. Universities are academic institutions in Europe. The idea that you would leave a stronger academic kid out and admit an athlete who is much weaker academically is an American phenomenon. I have heard in our county certain schools fixing grades (talking about C students here) for recruited athletes so they can attend schools such as Stanford….

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2051

There are many reasons for this, I think. In some cases, schools make money. Even when schools don’t make money, sports often has positive benefits for the school’s brand and the alumni’s love for the school (and donations). In other cases, athletics provide social mobility. One could even say that athleticism is another type of “intelligence.”

I am using none of the above as justifications. In fact, I agree with you. Just pointing out potential reasons for the American fixation on college sports and disparate admissions practices.

Interesting fact, our HS had a girl admitted to Harvard as a swimmer. She was the only one admitted to Harvard from our HS in that year, so you could see her scores on Scoir. I won’t tell you her scores and GPA, but she wasn’t even remotely academically qualified for Harvard.

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2052

Those are the lies that AD’s, coaches, and administrators (including Presidents) want you to believe to justify their compensation. We need a top coach to attract talent…and win…so we can raise money. Generally BS.

Take a look at the Big 10 Conference for 2023. As a conference, they returned $15M to the schools as “profit”. Click on the "where the money comes from tab, and you’ll see that “student fees” made up $29M. I’d call that a net loss for education.

The idea that donations would “dry up” has a couple of issues. The first is that athletic donations could afford to go down if the cost of the sports weren’t so high. Schools sell the idea that success breeds success, but in their pursuit of greatness they all lose money. Here’s an article (pre-pandemic) that found 18 profitable & 211 money-losing NCAA Division-I public athletic programs in 2020. I doubt much has changed in 4 years.

More importantly, the very large contributions to schools generally aren’t for athletics, they are from alums who have made tremendous amounts of money and want to give back. Large and small schools. Universities and LACs. The very rich don’t care about the football team, they care about the science labs, the medical school, and the art department.

It’s also important to note that alumni giving represents a surprisingly small portion of university giving. Here’s a link to a 2022 report on Philanthropy for higher education.

Foundations (33.1%) and alumni (23.2%) were the leading contributors, accounting for a combined 56.3% of all reported gifts. Nonalumni individuals (16.6%), corporations (13.2%), and other organizations (13.9%) made up the remainder of the support.

Alumni give less than a quarter of the total. The notion that a losing football team is going to bankrupt the school is not only wrong, it’s inverted. No football team at most US colleges and universities would leave more money for education.

EDIT: I’m all for schools spending money on sports as an activity for the students (like DIII mentioned above)… but running development leagues for professional sports while taking money from gambling companies is a losing proposition to me, both ethically and financially.

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2053

That judgment is not for you to make.

One of my students with a 3.0 gpa, no rigor and test optional is at an Ivy (because it was an ACT score at the average) and getting all As and Bs. Clearly anyone making the judgment that person isn’t academically qualified would be wrong.

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2054

Some college sports teams are also the developmental league for Olympic teams (and not just the US’s)

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2055

It is certainly not for YOU to make, since you don’t even know what the stats in question are.

I went to an Ivy. There are ABSOLUTELY people there who are not qualified to be there. You seem to embrace the false logic that “if you are admitted, you must be academically qualified.” It is simply not the case.

I went to school with a woman who had a last name that was on many buildings on campus. Big donor family. She had a very, very rough time at school.

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2056

I didn’t say that.

2057

Define “qualified to be there”.

Seriously. I mean it.

Because this idea that the Ivies (and similar) are rarified academic utopias where only the most brilliant and intelligent and such can or should be admitted is silliness at best. Even leaving aside the impossibility of measuring intelligence, it really is the case that a much, much wider range of students is capable of being successful at high-prestigiosity institutions than many would like to admit.

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2058

If you’re going to have any sports, you’re going to develop athletes who eventually make an Olympic team. It’s a discussion of pennies, when we’re discussing dollars.

2059

Please.

People on CC play the “Chance me” game all the time. If you play this game (we haven’t), parents will want to know your GPA, number of APs, AP Scores, and standardized test scores. If you leave these things out, they will hound you for them.

And now you come along and tell me that it is “impossibility to measure intelligence?”

You had better send an email to the colleges and tell them to stop collecting GPAs and test scores. It is apparently all a waste of time.

You may not like it and it may be imperfect, but these are the tools that we use to measure academic acumen.

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2060

Those are not the only tools schools use to determine acumen/admission though. For maybe the 15 millionth time on CC elite schools are looking for more than raw stats.

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