Roughly two-thirds of presidents over all said they believed the past year’s scandals had “hurt the reputation of all higher education, not just the institutions involved,” and an overwhelming majority (86.9 percent) said they did not believe that the presidents of institutions with big-time sports programs were “in control” of those programs. Three-quarters also agreed with the statement that “colleges and universities spend way too much money on intercollegiate athletic programs.”
From Inside Higher Ed’s survey of college and university presidents.
Faculty at the U of O can whine whine whine all they want but the fact is your athletic program puts butts in the seats in your academic programs and kids do show up because of athletics and the brand it creates. Your football program, whether you like it or not, has catapulted your University into the national spotlight and put you on kids’ radars. The vast majority of 18 year old kids could care less, initially, about that grand research you are doing or how rigorous your academic departments are. They want to go to a “cool” school. As those kids progress academically and figure out what they want to do with their lives then faculty and the programs they create become more important. I would submit, however, that their initial decision has a lot to do with your brand and your “coolness” factor. Like it or not, your football program has done a lot to create a “cool” brand and put butts in your classrooms. Faculty may not like athletics and the money spent, but most big time institutions and their boards would agree that athletics matter in recruiting students and branding. You want some cheese with that whine?
Spoken like someone with a high school education who supports a college sports program (of a school he didn’t actually attend) like it’s a pro sports team.
– Data do not support that there are enrollment effects attributable to sports.
– We are more interested in the 18-year-old looking for a strong academic experience than the 18-year-old looking for a cool school. I know, our priorities are crazy.
– Almost 40 percent of students do not complete a degree at the university. This is true at many state flagships, so on that we’re typical. The “cool school” crowd are disproportionately well represented in this group. Again, the data do not support that athletics contributes anything to student outcomes. Even the most athletically attuned students (our revenue sports athletes?) need not complete their academic degree when the athletic department is through with them. (Anyone have the data on degree completion among these athletes?)
I think the bottom line is that faculty and students would like to know the price they’re paying for athletics so they can decide if they would like to continue purchasing the program they have. Up to this point, they seem to have had no say in the matter. If you were forced to make your Walmart purchases with the cost of these purchases being siphoned directly from your bank account, you would have a problem with that. If it took public records requests to determine just how much was being siphoned, you would have a bigger problem, I would think. If Walmart acted to block these requests and obfuscate, you would probably start a blog about it.
Even the NCAA’s own analysis of the data does not provide much support for the idea that big-time college sports programs increase enrollment, or for the other supposed positive spillovers from college sports to college academics.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/971644/uomatters/IAC/NCAA%20Orzag%202007.pdf
The data on the negative consequences, on the other hand, is pretty clear: corruption, domestic violence, drinking, etc.
Dog says
College Athletics have always been a very important part of University life, university fundraising, and university infrastructure. The issue is not that college sports are a necessary evil that Universities participate in. Its really a matter of balance between investments in athletic and academic infrastructure. At the UO those investments have been very unbalanced for the last 15 years or so.
I think the overall issue is best framed as follows:
1) Do you want to attract students to your university because of a rich set of relevant academic offerings that will increase their intellectual and academic capacities and adequately prepare them for productive citizen ship?
2) Do you want to attract students to your university because of its high level of athletic programs and consistent rankings in the top 25.?
In an ideal world, both reasons exist.
In an unbalanced world, more resources are put into 2 than 1. This is where the UO is (along with many other institutions). The issue then how long can a university continue to do this.
In the real world, if your university doesn’t offer point 1, eventually
students stop coming, no matter how well your teams produce. For me,
the issue is that sufficient academic disinvestment has occurred that I believe, our academic mission, as I have defined it about, is now lagging.
In terms of basic faculty morale, when you see new Arenas constructed
year in and year out and you teach in a dingy classroom from the 1950s year in and year out, a large disconnect sets in.
te university of oregon, along with U. colorado, benefits from a nexus of attributesthat allows us to thrive despite the neglect and antagonism of thr rest of the state, except the stream of resident students who we serve better than the gruel funding the state provides. pull any one of the major factors out and it all comes tmbling down what are the factors? visible academic success, visible athletic success in a conference of mostly equal or better universities, a beautiful student-friendly locale, and adjacent to a state withh a steady stream of good students that the UC system doesn’t have room for. we, the faculty, underestimate the visibility athletics bring, and others, including recent academic leaders, underestimate the fact that academic success rests on the quality and good will of the faculty. theseare leaders who failed the campus while patting themselves on the back for their brilliance.