What is the point of college sports?

Parent Cafe
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<p>What exactly is the point of formal organized sports at a college and how is it beneficial to the goals of an education?</p>

<p>I would say that it has no benefit and is actually a waste of money.</p>

<p>First of all, sports are NOT academic, not one bit, unless you plan on being a gym teacher or some sorts of sports psychiatrist. That, however wouldn’t warrant wasting all that money on coaches, trainers, and sports facilities on a college campus.</p>

<p>This is what I DO support: A recreational center with all the necessary facilities needed by students to play sports on their own in an intramural way. If you want to play basketball in college, then students on campus could organize their own intramural leagues and have all the fun they want. Same thing if you want to play football so bad. A student football organization could ask for funding for equipment and then organize games on their own. At least they aren’t wasting money on coaches and trainers. </p>

<p>I don’t understand why colleges waste so much money on organized sports. It is NOT academic and it’s a WASTE of money.</p>

<p>But then, then athletes will say: but I want to play (blank) sport!
I answer: then create a club for said sport, organize the games on your own, petition to student government for funding for equipment, but DONT expect the university to waste money on coaches/trainers salaries, multi-million dollar stadiums and all the other related expenses to running an organized college sports team.</p>

<p>This doesn’t just apply to Division 3 schools, but Division 1 too. Why do these great universities, these centers of scholarship, waste millions upon millions of dollars in maintaining a sports team.</p>

<p>For example: USC football. If you are a young talented football player and dream of playing in the NFL one day, then why are you going to college when most of your energy will be spent doing sports?</p>

<p>This is my solution for all you college sports fans out there: First of all, realize that college if for LEARNING and DEGREES and not for dumb sports. Second, why can’t there be sports academies? If you’re a jock and can’t let a day go by without your precious sports, then you should go to one of those sports camps, except it’s year-round.</p>

<p>Anyway, I’ll stop my rant for now and ask for your responses.</p>

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<ol>
<li>The money issue… A division one football team makes a lot more money than it spends; “waste” of money is not an issue for these teams.</li>
<li>The IM/club sports idea… IM/club sports do use up money since they don’t draw in profits.</li>
<li>The “sports academy” issue… The vast majority of college players (including D1) will not make their living playing sports. Even those who do play professionally generally work other jobs that require a college degree after retiring from the sport. </li>
<li>The schools are for academics issue… There are a lot of aspects of colleges that are not academic. Do you think non-Conservatories should bag their orchestras, too?</li>
<li>The sports having no benefit issue… I think you’ll find that schools with competitive sports teams have more school spirit than other schools; fine sports teams hold students together in a way few other things can. I’m mostly guessing here, but I’d say students with school pride end up donating more and more regularly to the school after graduation. Also, many sports, particularly college football and basketball, draw in many black students who may otherwise have chosen not to go to college. I would guess that eliminating sports would cut the numbers of minority groups at these campuses.</li>
</ol>

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<p><a href=“http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2007/writers/frank_deford/01/10/birmingham.southern/index.html[/url]”>http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2007/writers/frank_deford/01/10/birmingham.southern/index.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>While I disagree with a lot of what this guy says most of the time, he does have some good points with this article.</p>

<p>But subtract football and basketball, you’ll find that the vast majority of student athletes are in college for “academic” reasons, and after graduation, go into non-sports related jobs.</p>

<p>I go to USC and I was once joking to one professor, and asked him if any of the football players had ever taken his class (since he teaches advanced physics). And, in fact, one actually had; several years ago a walk-on member of the football team took this professor’s other class(not advanced physics), and not only made an A, but got the highest grade in the class (no snide comments about the quality of USC students, please :slight_smile: ) Admittedly this guy was probably 3rd string and didn’t get any athletic scholarship money.</p>

<p>A major division 1 sports program does do one very important thing: increase the visible public profile of the school. The average matriculating student quality at USC shot up dramatically between 2003 and 2006, and while the primary reason is likely the increasing academic reputation, probably winning two national football championships and playing for a third helped as well. :)</p>

<p>And, actually, division 3 schools are probably the best examples of the idea of student athletes - since there are no athletic scholarships, and little chance of playing professionally, the athletes are students first and athletes second.</p>

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<p>I totally agree with the OP. I’ve never really understood the whole college sports thing. If you want a career in sports then you should be pursuing that, rather than going off to college to get into sports. It seems a rather strange way of going about things to me!<br>
Over here in the UK, we basically just have intramural sports at university and people who want to go into professional sports work their way up through football academics, local teams, etc.</p>

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<p>There are plenty of schools that do NOT have football, or emphasize sports at all. For Dramaprincess and kassos, if you’re looking for a school that deemphasizes sports, there are plenty of them. Many students and alumni are looking for bigtime sports as part of their college experience. I know my kids are. I don’t understand this debate. My son could care less about acapella groups- but he doesn’t question why the exist, or are so popular at some schools. As far as being a money drain- successful athletics draw money in, not out.</p>

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<p>

At it root it goes back to the belief that a balanced life of mind and body is the optimal human condition.You have a couple or three thousand years of civilization (at least) to overturn before the construct of the scholar athlete goes away. Look at the selection qualifications for the Rhodes Scholarship (widely considered the most prestigious) for a taste of what you are up against. But the real reason is that it drives the solely academic brain-in-a-jar folks nuts. :wink: JMO.</p>

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<p>Sports are leadership laboratories. There’s a broad range of informal learning, team building experience, development of interpersonal skills, and time and resource management that is central to competitive sports participation at the collegiate level, and that is also of significant, meaurable value to potential employers as many of those skills transition easily and quite profitably into the work force. </p>

<p>In addition, many collegiate athletes (swimming, diving, etc.) leverage training, athletic development and competition to prepare for Olympic participation. (D’s roommate is such an example - she’s now with her country’s national team and expects to compete in China.)</p>

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<p>I just watched this you tube video and one of the things the announcer says is something like “perhaps this is the original idea behind college sports” <a href=“http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDBXctFlWTA[/url]”>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDBXctFlWTA&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>Scholarship, relative to entertainment (starting with football), is distinctly overrated.</p>

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<p>That’s the great thing about the US method of higher education. If you don’t like big-time sports in college, find a college without sports. There’s something for everyone out there. I don’t get that college football has become the AAA league for the NFL, but I also don’t care. If it was undesireable, those schools couldn’t attract students, faculty or money. Lots of folks like big college sports and I’m perfectly happy letting them have their circuses.</p>

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<p>Let’s break this down into two intercollegiate categories: Big-time college sports and small-time college sports. Small-time college sports tend to engage a fair percentage of the student body at small schools. So, they tend to benefit a large proportion of students, directly. Big-time college sports are a different animal. </p>

<p>Big-time college sports exist for one major reason: marketing. If you run an Ivy League school, or another school that is extremely well-known for the quality of its faculty and graduates, you can attract bodies for your classes with your brand-name reputation for academic excellence.</p>

<p>If you run a large state university, or even a large private school, and you do not have a reputation for academic excellence, it is not as easy to herd the cattle into your lecture halls. There are many, many schools out there that “no one has heard of.” Having a Division 1 football program gets your name on ESPN, the local newspapers, regional newspapers, local TV sports shows, etc. Having a successful Div. 1 football program gets your school’s name repeated endlessly on national media outlets, as well as on the local ones.</p>

<p>There are many, many, many students who go to college primarily to run up a very hefty bar tab. To them, big-time sports programs can be a large part of what makes actually having to attend classes bearable. Large schools with little or no branding in the area of academic excellence need these students. It is not uncommon to find these schools taking 70%+ of their applicants, and one must assume that a good number of those rejected were simply not up to doing college work (since a large number of those accepted certainly aren’t).</p>

<p>So, big-time sports are an oddity of the American system of higher ed that must fill classes, and must have name recognition to do so.</p>

<p>Note that there are oddities and exceptions. There are schools with big-time sports that do not need to have them, and schools that could really benefit from having big-time sports that have shunned them. But, by and large, I think the pattern mostly holds true.</p>

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<p>just curious-- When people say that sports programs bring in $$ to a school, is it distributed in any way, or is it just fed back into the sports programs?</p>

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<p>College sports exist for a lot of different reasons and at a lot of different reasons at the various schools out there and it is very difficult to generalize. But even the largest semi-professional programs frequently contribute to the academic enteprise in a manner that casual opservers rarely recognize. Try running a sports medicine program at you medical school without college atheletic teams. College atheletes are frequently the real world lab rats for medical studies.</p>

<p>BTW the Ivy League IS nothing more than an atheletic conference and while they allegedly do not give atheletic scholarships they have recruiting budgets, facilities, and coaches salaries that would turn many a “Big Time” State U AD green with envy.</p>

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<p>“At it root it goes back to the belief that a balanced life of mind and body is the optimal human condition.”</p>

<p>Then why isn’t participation in sports required of all students throughout all the college years? Most schools don’t require any participation and those that do, require only one or two semesters of “P.E.” </p>

<p>“Sports are leadership laboratories.”</p>

<p>Then why are formal sports activities limited to college undergraduates? How did the Harvard B-school football team do in last year’s grad school championship series? Will the Goldman Sachs round ball team make it to the Financial Final Four this year?</p>

<p>These leadership laboratories benefit only the 1 or 2% of athletes that participate and not the majority of non-athletes on campus.</p>

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<p>If you don’t want big time college sports, then go to same POS LAC that nobody has ever heard of in the middle of Maine. The overwhelming super majority of people at Ohio State, Michigan, Florida, Penn State, etc love college football and basketball and the attention and revenue it brings to your school. Alumni will donate more money if the football team is winning. Look at the University of Alabama bringing in Nick Saban at $4 million plus a year, it will return fivefold in alumni donations if he brings the Crimson Tide a NC trophy.</p>

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<p>This statement is in great dispute. First off, I believe it is generally agreed that high-performing sports teams bring in more revenue for the athletic program. It is MUCH less clear that it brings in donations for other parts of the school. In fact, I would say that the majority of evidence suggests that this is not true.</p>

<p>So, the “fivefold” in alumni donations (seems like a bit of a high multiple) may happen, but it’s likely to happen only with donations to the athletic program.</p>

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<p>You are quite wrong. The Ivy League cooperates in a number of areas, many of them academic. So does the Big 10. So do many members of “sports” conferences.</p>

<p>As for Ivy League coaches’ salaries turning state U ADs green with envy, that could be true in the Olympic sports. I really wouldn’t know. But it’s certainly not true of the really big time football and basketball coaches, who can earn millions in direct remuneration and millions more in promotional contracts.</p>

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<p>The vast majority of students will spend their four years (if that!) at their alma maters and go off to the world of work using virtually none of the skills they learned in school (according the Department of Labor, 86% of jobs requiring college degrees do no require a single skill learned in college), pushing paper, selling coffee, teaching kiddies, etc., etc., and being entertained on weekends by college and professional ATHLETES for the rest of their lives.</p>

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<p>

This is the question my son has repeatedly been asking me. “What is the point? So much of what I am busting my butt over, I am never going to use. Why are we paying so much to learn about things I don’t need or even want to know?” Okay, Mini, help me with a good, solid answer here. My response of “growing”, having a well-rounded education, and sampling different interest areas has not cut it with him.</p>

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<p>mini:</p>

<p>Interesting stat. Now, is this study saying that learning to write better doesn’t matter in most jobs, or learning to construct a cogent argument, or is it referring to vocational skills such as, say, accounting?</p>