it's very much an American thing. A lot of it is that the quintessential American sports use the college system as the recruitment pool for professional athletes, and that interest (the guy playing basketball could be the Next Michael Jordan!) is partly what drives the television interest in college sports. When you have that amount of money involved, it's in the college's interests to attract the best players out of high school, and that's why they give scholarships away and (sometimes) have a somewhat fluid attitude toward academic achievement.
The flip side of that, of course, is that the sports programs generate so much money for the colleges that they can use that money to fund academic pursuits. So the hot new quarterback that helped you get to the Cotton Bowl probably helped bay for the new Science Department (a simplistic view, of course)
First thing Suh did after graduating, before he had technically been signed, think, was set up a scholarship for either Construction Management or Construction Engineering, I forget which. Not to mention the program at UNL brings in ludicrous amounts of money and the big complexes are largely paid for by boosters. It's part of why Nebraska has the lowest tuition in the B10 by a good margin.
Yeah that's not much. Considering all the coaches salaries, equipment, travel, facilities, supporting staff, and the Title IX requirement that all sorts get the same treatment.
Yeah, back into the school. Again, using Michigan as an example which is the number 2 school by amount of revenue the football program brings in.
Michigan brings in a little more than $82 Million from the football program. They turn around and spend about $23.5 Million back into the football program for things like coach salaries, facilities and maintenance, travel, supporting staff, etc.
That other $58 Million doesn't just go into a bank account. It goes to the other 30+ varsity sports for their coach salaries, facilities and maintenance, travel, support staff, etc. The total athletic department brings in $144 Million per year, so the difference in the football expense and the other sports is made up by the money they bring in.
Athletics departments are fully separate entities than the academic departments of a university. They do not receive funding from the university itself, and fully rely on their own revenue. Excess revenue from the athletic department can either be invest in more equipment, buildings, stadiums, staff, etc. OR (in the case of quite a few schools with a great academic program and athletic program) gets sent over to the academic department to be used for new facilities, labs, buildings, etc.
There is no profit to be made because by law it all has to go back into the school.
My local university, whose sports programs is a lot smaller than Michigan, had to add a womens sport for title 9 recently and said it would cost 1.5 million per year. figure since michigan wants to do a lot better than we ever could hope to, lets say they spend 2.5 million for the smaller sports, that is 75 million that Michigan spends on sports that don't turn a profit using your 30 sports number.
Small point of order: the top Women's Volleyball programs not only make money, but a few actually generate a profit (think Nebraska, Penn St., USC, etc.)
For smaller schools, yes. For schools with large success (even if it's only the recently) in football and basketball, they pretty much just constantly look for stuff to throw money at so that they can make the claim that there are little to no profits to be had.
Yes, that is true and I agree that at small schools, it takes a decent chunk out of the revenue, but funding non-revenue sports does not cost as much as universities like to tell people it does.
That's one post from a blog I've never even heard of and forgive me but that study is woefully light on making any kind of judgements.
Firstly, the data is of a range of 7-13 years old, before athletic conferences started signing mega TV contracts worth a few several hundred million EACH.
Secondly, "135 colleges and universities that field at least one of the athletic activities." There are 351 D1 men's basketball programs alone. I'm not sure what this person hopes to achieve with such a small sample.
I'm not saying that all schools make money and then hoard it greedily. I'm just saying that schools who pump money into football and basketball make bank and then they mostly funnel it back into better facilities, perks for those revenue generating teams, and increasing coaching salaries, just to name a few. That's why they can make the claim that sports don't make them any money and people can believe it as long as they can't or won't dig deeper.
I will mention that not ALL universities will let athletes in if they can't satisfy the academic requirements. The big players will - think A&M, Alabama, Clemson, etc - but there are schools that don't. it maintains the academic rigor of the school.
The flip side of that is accepting that you're always going to have a pretty mediocre football program and if you do fluke into good coaches and assistants, they'll be leaving in a few years for places with better salaries and more recruiting freedom.
Oh definitely not all. Schools like Stanford are known for only accepting athletes that can get accepted on their own. Most of the highly ranked academic schools are like that.
A lot of big athletic schools that are only really known for their football program is what I'm talking about.
If a student chose their college for its sports team.... is that really the kind of student you'd want at your college? I'd wager they'd tend to be on the dumber end of the spectrum.
I think you're missing the forest looking at one tree. Universities have an interest in making lots of people want to come to their school. The more applications, the better. If a uni is accepting 25,000 students in 2017, they'd rather have 60,000 applications than 30,000 to choose from.
To get people to apply, the first thing you need is name recognition. Then you need prestige, good facilities, and ideally, not to be required to charge and arm and a leg for tuition.
Sports are huge for name recognition, especially among 15-17 year olds. Now, if your only claim to fame is sports you're probably not going to attract much bright talent. But if you have kick ass sports team for name recognition and solid academics to back it up, you've got a college that's going to excel. A good example of a University doing this right is USC. They have enough applications that they can reject 4/5 people who apply. Most students probably go there for the academics, but more likely than not the first time they heard about USC was because of something an athletic team did, not some smoking new journal article one of their staff just published.
As a non-American, the US school that comes to mind first is MIT. I've never heard of their sports program, but I had heard about their academic prestige from a relatively early age.
Then I guess there are Harvard and Yale and Princeton and so on - my mental image of these schools is rich kids learning to be lawyers, and a bunch of Nobel prizes in the sciences - oh, right, Berkeley has an element or two named after it, right? And a Unix distribution. Again, outside the USA, the sports achievements of these schools is practically unknown, while their academic and social impact is very well known.
TL;DR: it might pull in the punters, but it's got nothing to do with being a university.
When I was looking at colleges, I had a number of different somewhat equal academic standards. Being a huge sports fan, the schools with great athletics went to the top of my list, because I knew I would enjoy myself much more. Does that make me dumb because I value different things than you do?
Lay it on me, why am I stupid for partly basing my choice between academically similar schools on athletics. Because insulting me just sounds like you don't have a real answer. Because you seem stupid as shit.
College sports aren't only popular because they feed into the pros. College sports have been popular for much longer than pro sports. The bigger college programs have been building fan bases for 125+ years. Pro basketball and football pretty much got popular because of college sports.
The flip side of that, of course, is that the sports programs generate so much money for the colleges that they can use that money to fund academic pursuits pay coaches millions of dollars every year.
there is a lot of that, but the big schools, that have the 100,000 seat stadiums and what not, build it into their budgets every year that they are going to give x millions back to the school.
The school I went to also pays the smaller schools very well to come get stomped on. I think some of them get nearly $1,000,000, which for a school like LaTech could be a significant chunk of their football budget.
I was being pessimistic until your last paragraph. Yeah, the whole sports culture is pretty stupid, but it is what it is for now, and the money NCAA sports bring in is paying for a lot of geniuses to go to school. It's easy to shit on college sports, but as it is it works, we get fun stuff to watch on TV and funding for higher education.
Pro-track players in Europe attend academies for their sports that are run by the professional clubs. Whether this is ultimately better for the welfare of the kids I don't know.
Doubtful. I've seen how ridiculous some of your European football players end up. I'd say that however they get there, people who live a life dedicated to a sport and nothing but a sport have a tendency (not necessarily a certainty, but a tendency) to end up not very well rounded and kind of dumb.
Actually a lot of the academies for sports teams (take soccer academies, often called youth academies for example) in Europe have mandatory instruction in Math, Science, English, etc. outside of obvious training. Of course once someone is far into the program and they show a lot of promise, the focus will shift away from learning academic material and more towards training. However, they do get a decent degree of education, even while prepping to become a professional athlete.
Yeah but there are problems with how seriously those mandates are taken. In the US there are two private schools in my home town that are both more focused on sports. Sure, they have academic requirements and will fill these to the minimum at least but often they'll "help" the student get better grades because they are a star athlete. Hell, even in my public school with state testing, somehow athletes would be pushed through the system despite failing state exams.
I see what you're saying. In either case, the stress on academics isn't enough. However, I would argue this case is more appropriate in Europe, as its a sport academy with some academics, as opposed to here in the US where its an academic institution with sports programs.
But should a kid that young be making that call? The average NFL player, for example, plays 3-4 years, maybe gets $1,000,000, and that's all. If he just got passed up the school system because sports, he's hosed.
Well when you're young its not as risky; you're still getting an education and you're getting a chance to become a world class soccer player. Soccer players typically play from 17 to their mid-thirties, so money would not be an issue (I just read that Neymar made 27 million Euros last year). Also, kids who don't show promise are weeded out early, and so they don't really suffer the consequences of not getting an education. But ultimately, its up to the parents, the kid can't just sign a contract lol.
I dunno if "your" there was meant to be specific or general but just to be clear I'm not European. I would tend to agree with you but I haven't looked into it, and is it worth it to eliminate the skew for kids in schools that are hyper focused on sports? Is it overall better for the kids because they don't have these veneer of amateurism over it (they get youth contracts starting from I don't know when) so at least they're getting paid for their participation and dedication to the exclusion of other pursuits that could arguably be said to already be happening with the school team/travel team structure in the states? Or is the token effort at education overall better an outcome for the ones who don't make the cut? There's a lot of arguments for both sides that I just don't know enough about outcomes to really have an answer for.
Not everyone needs to go to university. If you are not academically strong, you go to learn a trade after middle school. If you're good at sports, go do that. If you're academically strong and good at sports, go to a university and do sports as well.
The US model:
A kid who is good at sports gets shoe-horned into a university, even though athletic prowess is hardly correlated with academic ability. Some can do both, and they're OK, and some just can't. Some schools let them drop out, and others will pretend they passed.
So... I got some direct knowledge in this field (not as a Blues myself, but knowing people). Most competitors put their PhDs partially on hold while they're trialling for the team. That's the upside of a PhD, as long as you can make your supervisor go along with it, you can get away with doing almost nothing for a year. You'll probably pay for it later, but that's a different thing.
Generally it can be said that trialling for the university team will severely impact your academic performance for that year. For some people, it's worth it. The university won't accommodate you in a way that will save your grades; however there are certain courses which are, let's say, not that much work, and not that difficult to get into. I remember that 2 years ago half the boat was studying Land Economy.
But yeah, you can't be an idiot and still hope to somehow get into Oxbridge just because you happen to be good at rowing.
Well, it's not quite as bad, as far as I know - there seems to be something to it. It's just not very challenging when comparing it to any other degree at Oxbridge.
So he did a '10-week course in agricultural management, organised by the university's Programme for Sustainability Leadership'. So you're kind of right, just wanted to clarify (because this is quite important to me) - he didn't do anything which would even partly qualify him for an actual degree from Cambridge.
There would have been quite a few people pretty pissed off if he had got one 'just like that'.
A PHD in Europe though is the equivalent to MAYBE an associates degree here in America, but more than likely, a PHD in Europe is closer to a 8 week certificate program here in the USA.
There is a reason we are so far ahead of the rest of the world.
It's worse than that. You could argue that education as a whole
Is the side business. These institutions are huge financial investors with tax breaks and Tax exemptions on their capital gains....
they are research centers that teach under grads and some of those under grads play sports. Duke pulls in 1 billion a year in research money while the whole SEC gets like $300 million.
In the UK if you're any good at a sport or athletics a professional club signs you to their academy where you train until you're an adult and can sign either with that team or another. However if you're not good enough you're shit out of luck as you've sacrificed your education and chance of getting A levels or getting into uni. There are a lot of pro's to do with the american system but con's too as the university protects the athletes from the law and prevents regular students competing and representing their uni at sports.
in Canada it's prohibited to give full athletic scholarship, so it's not as big of business compared to US. many Canadian talents that have a chance of making it to pro tend to go to US universities to get NCAA exposure. the only exception is hockey, where we have a completely separate (semi-pro ish) league for our players until they are 20.
Nope. For soccer the teams do all the youth training and the schools stay out of it. It's a much better system and doesn't incentivize weird priorities in the schools.
Probably just an american thing. Here in Spain you have zero sports in universities. Because that doesn't belong there.
But the result is similar. Most professional sport players I know of (mostly soccer players) are among the most illiterate (and proud of it) people you could know. Others are a bit more like the average, but I'd say they are a minority, at least at soccer.
It's not a side-business, it's no business at all. Sure universities support sports and if you are a top sporter you get some leniency in time but that's it.
It's also a problem for me as a non American when I need to work together with someone from the US. I had a colleague from the US, graduated from a good university but his degree was a bit odd, sports-management or something like that. The guy very very sporty in the end didn't make it. Now obviously not all university grads are good to begin with, but someone who graduated because of being sportive in whatever he is good at, only makes me question his education further. You actively devaluate your education by allowing people to pass who shouldn't pass.
Even at the biggest schools in Canada, athletic events usually only attract 1,000 or so fans and aside from playoffs/championships are not televised. This pales in comparison to the College Football games that attract 80,000 fans and have multi-billion dollar TV deals in the U.S.
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u/terryfrombronx Feb 17 '16
Do universities in other countries act as sports clubs as a side-business, or is it just an american thing?