COLUMN: Academics, not athletics, is the priority
Students attend universities for a variety of reasons – maybe you’re here because you hope your degree will reward you with money, perhaps your parents are paying and you feel pressured to attend, or maybe you really just love to learn. Whatever your reason for engaging in scholarly studies may be, there is one principle that is consistently held throughout universities worldwide and is even included in Utah State’s mission statement: Academics come first.
What is academia? Loosely defined by the Oxford dictionary, it is the compilation of teachers, students and learning in an academic environment. This should be the foremost priority for all college attendees, but there is a particular breed of students for which the principle of academics coming first is consistently untrue: Our beloved athletes.
As a former high-school athlete, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m crazy about an exciting basketball game. It’s fun and powerful and winning boosts the school morale. However, athletics should not be the priority for the players. They are students, first and foremost, and especially prominent students because they represent the school through their athletic involvement.
An average of 85 percent of student athletes are on scholarships (NCAA standards only allow 13 full scholarships per basketball team); so in men’s basketball and football alone, we have about 120 male athletes on full scholarship. This includes tuition, food and housing, books and a monthly stipend of around $400. Altogether, in these two men’s sports, this is well over $1 million spent every year on scholarships alone – and that’s estimated using the cheapest meal plan and in-state tuition.
It’s nothing short of incredible that this much money is being spent on their education when you consider that a majority of players do not come close to the national average GPA, which, according to MSNBC, is 3.22. Not even half of USU’s student athletes have met that range, and our school brags an unusually high athletic GPA. As a group, athletes are no less intelligent than any other random sampling of college students. Why, then, are they consistently given lesser academic standards to measure up to, and then rewarded with full scholarships? Very little effort is required with classes and assignments to get a 2.0 GPA, and that’s all it takes to keep an athletic scholarship.
Some say that the sports programs make money for the school, but the NCAA financial report I obtained from Indystar.com states that the difference between the revenue spent and the revenue made from sports was a grand total of $502 for USU. This is disgustingly unjustifiable; especially because the bottom line is that the school’s responsibility is not to make money off the athletes. It is to give them an education. All students should be earning scholarships based on their academic achievements, not athletic prowess.
You may ask, “Well, isn’t the money spent well worth them getting their education?” According to Thesportjournal.org, “College athletes earn fewer bachelor’s degrees than do students in general, they take longer to do so, their grades are lower, and their curricula are less demanding.” I think that’s a pretty solid no for an answer. Universities do a great disservice to athletes by demanding less of them academically; only 2-3 percent of athletes go on to play professional sports. The rest are generally left with a BA in an area you can’t get a good job in without a master’s degree (psychology, sociology, etc), but their GPAs are too low for graduate school admission.
If athletes had to take out loans or meet scholarship criteria, just like the rest of us, and if they were held to the same academic standards that their non-athletic peers are, their grades would shape up real fast in order to keep a scholarship and they would have to take school more seriously. And what if they don’t? What if these athletes don’t want to pay to be a student? There are so many others who want to play college sports that finding those who are willing to pay for it themselves or meet a higher academic standard will not be a problem.
I understand that the athletic programs of colleges are not going to change anytime soon, and maybe they will never change at all. But for an institution whose top priority is supposedly educating students, I find the double standard between athletes and other students’ academic expectations to be, quite frankly, bullshit.
Liz Emery is a senior majoring in English. She can be reached at liz.emery@yahoo.com.