U.N.C. Investigation Reveals ‘Shadow Curriculum’ to Help Athletes

The ostensible point of university is to develop a student's mind to solve problems -- preferably in the real world, though humanities programs insist that paying $50k+/year to read poetry is just as valuable an investment. Even if you take that assertion at face value, I'm not sure anyone, anywhere pretends that playing basketball prepares the student-athlete for anything at all. Almost none of them have a chance at a professional sports contract. Most will graduate with useless majors, having squandered their youth and their health on pointless competitions to throw a ball in a hoop. It's STUPID. Everyone involved is wasting their time.

I'm all for athletics in colleges. I played intramural sports and enjoyed it, because nobody pretended that it mattered. But I really don't see a compelling case for the subsidy of organized college sports... which, like someone pointed out, is really just a a subsidy for professional organizations.

And it's not just the pointless waste of time and money in college sports. The argument for college as an institution is getting weaker and weaker as free online alternatives get better and better. Aside from getting drunk and cheering against UMichigan, what compelling features does Ohio State University offer versus Harvard's courses on edX?

It turns out that people want to watch their school beat another school, and they aren't particular about the athletes. You can say the individuals bring value, but they destroy an equal amount of value at some other school when they succeed.

Witness the last NBA lockout when the players had some all-star games and couldn't fill the seats. A mature competitive league is responsible for far more of the revenue than it gets credit for.

As mentioned, the curriculum would also include tangentially related fields.

I'm tired of seeing this argument without data. If you sit down and think about the numbers, you'll see that for the vast majority of NCAA athletes, this is false. Most get a very sweet deal relative to their market value if the NCAA did not exist.

First, limit to the NCAA sports that actually produce revenue, essentially men's football and basketball. If the NCAA did not exist, these players would at best be in a minor league (again except for the top dozen or two in the country). Now look at a sport that has a minor league in America: baseball. Minor league baseball players, even toward the top, make how much? $2000-3000 per month. And that's only in-season.

Paid tuition is already worth higher in cash value than that. And the value of the student-athlete experience? You can't put a price tag on it. Ask any former NCAA athlete what they would trade to give up their experience.

But, you respond, NCAA sports make way more money than baseball minor leagues. Yes, that's true. But it's not solely because of the players. It's because of the schools. Schools bring almost everything important to the table: A huge fanbase, a connection to a physical location and community, an illusion of amateur-ness, rivalries, all of these things you can't get to nearly that extent outside the NCAA.

The players? They have no bargaining power because without the NCAA system, they'd be hosed. They'd be working even harder for essentially less money, living a tougher lifestyle, and not even get the degree to show for it. Hard to argue they should be paid when they bring very little to the table compared to the schools.

The point people miss is that it's the combination of the schools and the players together that generates so much revenue. Either without the other would be out of luck. And right now, if you think about the numbers, the current split is pretty fair. The exception might be the few star players who could make millions in the pros.

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I want to say, I'm not saying that players aren't exploited currently. I think they are. But I think the exploitation boils down to your second paragraph: They lose a real education because they don't have their priorities in line at that point in their lives.

But the solution isn't to pay kids even more money/benefits to continue to masquerade as students while living as full-time athletes. The solution should be to divorce sports from education and create minor leagues. This will never happen because, as I stated above, it's the combination of schools and sports that generates so much money, and the people at the top won't give that up just to do the right thing.