<p>I don’t think the story here should be “Wow, a 2.57 GPA… That’s awful”</p>
<p>I think it should be more along the lines of “Wow, a 2.57 GPA… There must be rampant grade inflation going around in Ole Miss”</p>
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<p>To make that point, you would need to prove it. Is the average GPA at Ole Miss higher than it’s peers? Otherwise you’re just taking a cheap shot at Ole Miss. </p>
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<p>Of course working a full time job makes it harder to excel in your classes. If I was a hiring manager, looking at two recent grads, one with a 3.7 GPA and the other with a 3.4 GPA (but worked a full time job, played a time consuming sport, very active in ECs…etc.), I would be much more likely (with all other factors being the same) to hire the 3.4 GPA candidate. </p>
<p>I would also assume there is a reason why “Greeks” have minimum GPAs, otherwise without the requirement, many would struggle to keep an average or better GPA. </p>
<p>“one with a 3.7 GPA and the other with a 3.4 GPA”</p>
<p>Those GPAs, sure! But praising them for a 2.57? I don’t see or hear that anywhere but with athletes playing money sports.</p>
<p>^^^ They’re being praised by their head coach for having close to the same GPA as the average non-athlete student at public universities here in the US. It’s called positive reinforcement. </p>
<p>Nobody is saying they rival Harvard students for Pete’s sake. </p>
<p>@Hanna my point being we do expect students that have to work full time to have a lower GPA than if they didn’t have to work. </p>
<p>Did some digging and found the overall undergrad GPA at Ole Miss.</p>
<p>Spring 2012: Overall 2.83 GPA (Women 2.92; Men 2.71)
Fall 2012: Overall 2.68 GPA (Women 2.83, Men 2.52)
Spring 2013: Overall 2.80 GPA (Women 2.94, Men 2.63)
Fall 2013: Overall 2.74 GPA (Women 2.88, Men 2.57)
Spring 2014: Overall 2.79 GPA (Women 2.94, Men 2.62)</p>
<p>The men’s football team average GPA (2.57) doesn’t look that bad when compared to the overall Men’s average GPA at Ole Miss.</p>
<p>I agree it doesn’t look that bad. I still think it’s nothing to brag online about.</p>
<p>This was the original Tweet:</p>
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<p>I really don’t get how a head coach praising his current team for improving on previous teams’ academic performance and thanking them for a “great year” constitutes “bragging,” but clearly no one should ever Tweet anything they don’t want picked over with a fine-tooth comb. </p>
<p>I’d love to know the average GPAs of those vaunted scholar-athletes in the Ivy football programs, but that information appears to be a closely-guarded secret. </p>
<p>I wouldn’t be surprise if the average GPA for non-revenue generating scholar-athletes was higher than the schools overall average GPA; at Ole Miss or Yale. </p>
<p>“I’d love to know the average GPAs of those vaunted scholar-athletes in the Ivy football programs, but that information appears to be a closely-guarded secret.”</p>
<p>At least at Harvard, recruited athletes responding to a Crimson survey reported SAT scores about 200 points lower than the overall average, so the odds are pretty strong that their GPAs are somewhat lower, too. Anecdotally, in my class, they are underrepresented in Phi Beta Kappa.</p>
<p>There’s lots of information about the stats of student-athletes (both SATs and GPAs) coming into the Ivies, but very little about how well they fare once they get there (beyond high graduation rates). Factor in accusations of “grade inflation”* and it’s really anyone’s guess whether the average GPA of Ivy footbal teams are above or below 3.0.</p>
<ul>
<li><a href=“Grade expectations”>http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21615616-not-what-it-used-be-grade-expectations</a></li>
</ul>
<p>“I appreciate that this is a widespread viewpoint, but I think it’s rotten that so many people don’t expect average academic performance from athletes.” </p>
<p>There’s obvious reasons why you won’t get (on an overall basis) average academic performance from athletes in the big time money sports. In fact, it is virtually assured. </p>
<ol>
<li><p>Recruited athletes (at least in the money sports) generally have lower academic qualifications than the general student population.</p></li>
<li><p>Those athletes spend 40-50 hours per week on their sport. Basically a full time job.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>What do you think you are going to get if you take below average students and burden them with above average non-academic time demands?</p>
<p>“2. Those athletes spend 40-50 hours per week on their sport. Basically a full time job.”</p>
<p>THAT is the shame of it, to Hanna’s point. If I ran the world, which I clearly don’t, the amount of focus dedicated to sports would be more in keeping with intramurals. Get the exercise benefits, and if the play isn’t as good as it would be - well, that’s what pro sports are for. I recognize I’m clearly unrealistic, but colleges are making choices to have football programs that demand all those hours from players. Because of their values. Or lack thereof. </p>
<p>“There’s lots of information about the stats of student-athletes (both SATs and GPAs) coming into the Ivies, but very little about how well they fare once they get there (beyond high graduation rates). Factor in accusations of “grade inflation”* and it’s really anyone’s guess whether the average GPA of Ivy footbal teams are above or below 3.0.”</p>
<p>Sure. But the difference was - the Ivy / similar football team players were not marginal students in the first place. They may have been pulled in to box above their weight class, so to speak, but they were clearly students who were capable of getting college educations at most schools in this country.</p>
<p>It doesn’t really help the case of the football factories who admit any student with a pulse to point at Ivy League schools and say – “SEE? They let in someone with a 3.4 and a 1900 SAT!” Maybe it makes their boosters feel better about themselves, but it’s rather like being made aware that there are murderers on the loose in your town and saying, “Yeah, well, there are robberies in YOURS!”</p>
<p>Seriously, @Pizzagirl? You’re going to compare Old Miss (and presumably all the SEC schools sans the private Vanderbilt) to “murderers” in your lovely analogy?</p>
<p>Your need to over-simplify a very complicated calculus speaks as much about you and your “values” as it does about all these schools, which you clearly hold in great contempt. Those “football factories” are serious economic generators in their states, like it or not. </p>
<p>Yes, by all means, let’s do away with the rules that allow for the recruitment of borderline students at average public universities so these schools can be transformed into something akin to the elite schools that even the borderline students’ class valedictorians had little chance of attending. Clearly, attracting top students and faculty from around the nation to your poor state’s flagship school when you lack the funds generated by a strong football program is something you can just fix with some magic fairy dust and a bequest from Warren Buffett.</p>
<p>(And while we’re at it, in the spirit of “leveling the playing field,” let’s remove the tax exemptions of private research universities with endowments of more than, say, a billion dollars!)</p>
<p>I’m hardly a college football “booster” of any kind. I’m just a realist. What works for one state or economic model isn’t necessarily viable in another. But if and when you “run the world,” I’ll be happy to hear your ideas for how to make Ole Miss the next Michigan – academically and athletically. And then maybe you can convince Michigan and Cal (and while you’re at it Stanford and Northwestern) to reject athletic scholarships of any kind and act more like the Ivies, who (as of course you know) only offer need-based financial aid.</p>
<p>Good luck with that.</p>
<p>By the way, my point about the Ivies (which you quoted above) is that there’s no evidence that their football programs’ team GPAs are any higher than Old Miss’s. No one is comparing the average Ole Miss student to the average Ivy student, but you already knew that and still seem to want to make the Old Miss coach’s single Tweet praising his team for surpassing the academic performance of previous teams in their OWN school’s history with some horrible crime against God and humanity. The AUDACITY of anyone at some mediocre Southern football factory praising kids who could NEVER dream of having the academic resumes to play for a “good school” (defined as any school good enough for YOUR kid), apparently, is contemptible. </p>
<p>Luckily for you, you could afford to send your kids to elite private schools where no “marginal” students (aka the average graduates of poor public high schools) will ever be considered for admission.</p>
<p>The audacity isn’t in praising kids who could never dream of having the academic resumes to play for a “good school.”
I NEVER objected to the coach’s tweet praising his team. I think it’s GREAT that he actually called out academic performance as something worth striving for, because goodness knows everyone else around them is just caring whether they get the ball into the end zone. </p>
<p>The audacity is in the belief that it’s somehow in the “best interest” of someone who, THROUGH NO FAULT OF THEIR OWN, isn’t ever going to be an academic powerhouse, to put them in college and then hamper them by requiring them to, essentially, work a full-time job playing football because it’s more important to play football than it is to study and improve oneself academically. Only a handful of those kids are ever going to make it to the pros - and the rest are going to have meaningless degrees because they never got the chance to even learn how to perform in the classroom because … well, gotta get to practice, because NOTHING is more important than game day. Rah rah.</p>
<p>I think the hours that athletes are “required” to dedicate to their sports at the college level is ridiculous at all levels, from Ivy down to football factory. It’s just even more of a shame when it comes out of the hides of students who aren’t academically strong in the first place and / or never had a chance because they came from poor high schools.</p>
<p>Don’t you ever cringe when you see college football players on TV who are being interviewed and they can barely string 2 sentences together? Do you think “oh wow, it’s great that they get to play football” or do you just want to scream, “why doesn’t someone tell them that football isn’t all that important and they should get back in the classroom”?</p>
<p>And, I find it rather disgusting that the only way we care about students who are non-academic powerhouses is if they have the skill to throw a football. The non-academic powerhouses who don’t have that skill - well, they are really out of luck.</p>
<p>it’s disgust with the football machine, really, Lucie - not Ole Miss or similar schools specifically. </p>
<p>I don’t disagree with you at all about the current state of higher education and the outsize role football plays in it at almost every level, @Pizzagirl, but this is American capitalism at its finest. ESPN (presently led by an English Lit major from UNC and Columbia, I must add!) is the driving force beyond much of where this has headed in the last decade or so.</p>
<p><a href=“What Made College Football More Like the Pros? $7.3 Billion, for a Start - The New York Times”>The New York Times - Breaking News, US News, World News and Videos;
<a href=“http://espnmediazone.com/us/bios/skipper_john/”>http://espnmediazone.com/us/bios/skipper_john/</a></p>
<p>And what are we who find it so objectionable going to actually DO about it besides whine on CC that it’s all corrupt and bereft of true morality? The reality is the system reflects our nation’s priorities and is just one of a long list of things that I find frustrating beyond belief. </p>
<p>But that’s a separate thread. This one is about a coach tweeting his team’s (relative) academic successes and the Rorschach test response it received!</p>
<p>I think it is important to remember, for better or worse, that those “football factories” are funding merit scholarships, either directly or indirectly, for all those “academic” kids that some would prefer to see rewarded in lieu of athletes. For example, the licensing royalties of University of Alabama goes to the National Merit scholarships of UA (And the Bear Bryant Museum and Athletic Dept.). UA has a $600,000,000 endowment (40% of the income is earmarked for scholarships). Would that merit money be available if not for the popularity of college football at UA? Now, if the question is about the fairness of sending “smart kids” to school on the backs of the football players – that’s a interesting ethical question. But it seems unfair to be overly “disgusted” with the economic model that allows so many athletes AND academic stars the chance to earn a degree.</p>
<p>As I just said, I think it’s great the coach wants to encourage academic performance and so he said - hey, way to go guys, great GPA, keep up the good work. I think maybe there was a bit of tone-deafness on his part to the fact that in the larger world, a 2.57 GPA isn’t seen as “impressive” and it just furthers the stereotypes of dumb jocks. </p>
<p>Of course, it’d be great if the college itself said - you know, the amount of time we force these guys to play football is just obscene, we’re going to lower it by (say) 10 hours a week so these young men can spend more time getting an education, which is ostensibly what we are here for – but then their alumni base would roar, because what’s important than a winning football team, which I find just a sad state of affairs.</p>
<p>I think it’s fun when my own school’s football team (occasionally) wins games, and I hoot and holler with the rest when that happens, but I don’t pretend that it’s really All That Important or that it’s part of the core mission of why the college exists or why I should show loyalty to it. And I do think this becomes a statement about values. If I felt that they were compromising excessively on academics, I WOULD feel less loyal. As I should. It’s still supposed to be an academic institution, first and foremost.</p>
<p>I have some sympathy to the notion that football players should just be hired as paid gladiators. </p>
<p>But your alma mater has an endowment of nearly $8 billion, @Pizzagirl. They can “afford” to have a losing football team and to demand academic excellence out of all their students. For many public universities, the schools’ finances ebb and flow along with the successes of their football teams, so winning is (unfortunately) “everything.” </p>
<p>One of the commenters (“chris williams”) in that NYT story I linked to about the $7.3 billion ESPN has poured into college football made an interesting proposition, which I could certainly get behind:</p>
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<p>Of course, our current Congress, supported by a Supreme Court that has deemed corporations to be people, will never do any such thing! </p>
<p>I don’t know if Congress is the right governing authority, but it is pathetic that there can be no collective self-policing that athletes shouldn’t have to devote more than x hours to the sport. </p>