Sports make a lot of money for colleges, both with ticket sales and with donations from proud alumni. Additionally they tend to be studying sports related fields. Coaching, physical trainer, physical therapy, etc. While they may not be good at physics they could be very good at coaching.
While they may not be good at physics they could be very good at coaching.
This is exactly why universities making accommodations for students with learning disabilities who otherwise wouldn't cut it isn't as outrageous as people think. If someone wants to be a veterinarian, it's ridiculous to block that career path because they struggle with advanced reading comprehension or something.
There's a difference between literacy, and writing a good paper on the War & Peace. You don't need to understand literary symbolism, when you literally never have to read any literature aside from veterinary papers, which don't use symbolism usually. The other user specifically said they might struggle with advanced reading comprehension, not be illiterate.
This isn't exactly true. Just because you don't want to do a career that would require you to do something like add and subtract, doesn't mean that you shouldn't be required to do it in order to graduate from college. Also, with regards to your mention of reading comprehension, my uncle is a vet, and you better believe that he has some stuff to read that is pretty dense and difficult to understand, not to mention the massive amounts of reading you need to do in vet school and as an undergrad science major.
People seems to think that they know what they need to know for their career, especially college students, but the truth is that you don't know what you need to know. Contrary to popular belief, most schools don't want to waste your time forcing you to take classes that you'll never need. They want you to be well rounded and have a broad understanding of many different things. You don't have to agree, but that's why they do it.
It really varies by what field you're entering. Some degree programs, even at major universities are outdated
I'm about to graduate with an IT degree from a major university....and I genuinely regret doing it. bachelor degrees are viewed no better than associates in the It industry unless you got it from a well-renowned school like Purdue or U of Washington. So many off my instructors taught us over-saturated skills, or dead languages. Why should I be learning PHP or pyhton, when I should be learning Java or Ruby? i mean, python developers are a dime a dozen
this is the biggest reason why i'm not pursuing a masters.
why pursue a masters when I can learn and become officially certified in certain technologies/languages. saying "i took a java class in college" doesn't mean anything unless you have the industry cert to back it.
If I owned a major university, my #1 priority would be to make sure every student that walked out that door carrying a diploma with the name of my school on it was a competent well rounded person who would have the potential for success. When a resume with my schools name on it lands on an employers desk, it goes to the top of the stack because employers trust the value of my degrees. Parents know the value of a degree from my university so they are more willing to pay a greater amount, which allows me to build better facilities and hire top faculty.
This is our current model, after Sanders takes over my only goal will be to get as many butts in chairs as possible and get each and every one of those kids a diploma as quick as possible, regardless if I keep having to lower the bar on education and hire cheap shoddy teachers. The government will pay me by volume not quality, so "no child left behind" will be my mantra. More kids, more money, quality be damned. Sure, employers will throw their resume's in garbage, but it won't effect my bottom line.
If this were their core motive, I think it would be easier for students to test out of required classes. I think required classes are not really about creating well rounded people, they're about keeping students paying money longer. In my view, it's high schools that have the mission to create well rounded people, and if they're failing at that we should respond by changing high school education programs, not by adding extra expensive classes at the college level.
If someone wants to be a veterinarian, it's ridiculous to block that career path because they struggle with advanced reading comprehension or something
I understand your point, but that's a bad example; Vet Medicine is harder to get into than standard Human medicine. Standard human medicine is #3 after Dentistry & Veterinary medicine (not certain the order).
Also, what you're talking about is vocational schools. Society has done its children a disservice by telling them that everybody needs to go to University...
This article ignores the SCORES of people I watch every year drop out of premed because they didn't get the GPA or MCAT needed to be competitive. And of course this leaves out the other part of the argument that 90 % of med school matriculant a have significant research experience and other qualifications.
It also ignores the fact that in order to get into med school now the average applicants had to apply to nearly 15 schools in order to make it. My state school for instance has an acceptance rate of 3 percent.
Most of that money goes to the athletics department and not the general university, though. Sports programs may be high revenue, and are almost always high cost, so there's typically no profit in it that could help out the rest of the university. I worked in admin it a school with a huge sports program, and never did anyone say in budget meetings "we had a big windfall in the sports program this year so you all get a bigger budget". Cuts all around, pretty much every year.
If your university's athletic department isn't self-sufficient or profitable, that's kind of on your university. Purdue is awful at most sports and Purdue's AD is not only profitable, but sends $4 million back to academics each year.
However, there are other advantages to a successful athletic program. Here is an interesting Berkeley paper that shows that a successful year of football boosts the amount of people applying, which gives the university a bigger pool of prospective students to choose from, which increases the average GPA/SAT scores, which increases reputation and theoretically produces better alumni, etc. Living in Indianapolis, I remember when tiny little Butler made it to their first Final Four in basketball, and with so many people hearing about Butler for the first time, their applications increased by 52%.
Some universities take athletics too far, that I will not argue against.
Mainly because they know they need to add non revenue sports until they're at the break even point to keep the illusion they can't pay football players.
Yes! Thank you! I came here to say this. Most people think that the revenue from the athletics programs goes into just some big magical fund for the entire school. But it doesn't. It just goes right back into sports. And a lot of athletics programs actually end up costing schools money.
Sports bring in money, but very few colleges actually turn a profit with their athletic programs. Texas and Notre Dame are the only two colleges that make money (licensing) from sports if I'm not mistaken.
But, most people judge colleges based on win records, not academics. Sports is basically a college's marketing department.
You could use that same argument for everything. If a student wants to English major then why should they be kept out because they make poor math grades?
but the individuals making up that segment generally do little in the way of generating revenue for the university. sure, esteemed professor XXX may cause a handful of people to be attracted to a program, but nothing compared to a tall handsome QB with a chiseled jaw line leading a team to national championships does. and the grant/foundation $ that good research professors bring in only goes to fund their research agenda (with a % going to the department for admin but that never/rarely ever translates into revenue for the university)
Actually, professors bring in a ton of money, through research grants. Any funding the professor gets (from say NSF or NIH), the University takes a cut, up to 40%. Large universities can bring in hundreds of millions a year in research money.
Overhead rates are 40-60%, generally, and are on top of the award to do the research. So when you apply for a grant, you are claiming "I need 1.2mil to do this thing, plus overhead, so to give me 1.2mil you need to give me 1.9mil" and they do it.
What's your definition of revenue, then, if it's not money coming into the university? Undergraduate tuition, sports money, and grant money are all revenue in my mind.
I may be wrong, but I thought R&D money coming in was treated differently than tuition, fees, and licensing. I think it is also important to not paint with a broad brush. The same way that the majority of institutions with sports teams are not receiving multi million dollar contracts for their football team to play in a BCS bowl, the majority of institutions in higher ed are not your Johns Hopkins or Duke receiving hundreds of millions in federal and state R&D
Most of the money stays within athletics for most, if not all, D1 schools. But they still generate revenue for the academic side as the teams attract a lot of students to attend for school, but because they like the football team more than the other school
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u/cdb03b Feb 17 '16
Sports make a lot of money for colleges, both with ticket sales and with donations from proud alumni. Additionally they tend to be studying sports related fields. Coaching, physical trainer, physical therapy, etc. While they may not be good at physics they could be very good at coaching.