
Higher education is in a downward spiral. A recent Gallup Poll revealed that 68 percent of Americans believe the industry is headed in the wrong direction; only 31 percent see its trajectory progressing on a positive path.
The biggest criticisms are these colleges and universities aren’t teaching relevant skills. As a result, college degrees don’t mean as much. And related to this, these institutions aren’t helping enough to find graduate jobs. There’s also widespread sentiment that tuition prices are too high.
It gets worse. There’s this other major trend going on that wasn’t researched in the poll but there’s plenty of information being made public about. It’s the huge and unprecedented amounts of money college football and basketball players are being paid to play. Ohio State’s athletic director, Ross Bjork, recently revealed players on this year’s football team, who made it to the national championship game, have been paid collectively some $20 million during the past year through collectives, advertising opportunities, and other channels.
In other words, Ohio State bought their championship run.
The combination of higher education is viewed more negatively by Americans, and the pay-for-play money schemes now driving college sports into chaotic money grabs and roster turnover like never before means that this country’s colleges and universities are in peril and headed no place good in a hurry.
Running broken academic systems while pouring unseemly sums of money into athletic programs is making the entire enterprise of a college look confused, devoid of values, rudderless, and compromised.
Ohio State bought wins by paying more players more money. This doesn’t impress me or make me want to root for them. Even if my alma mater, Wake Forest, had to shell out $20 million to players to get to the championship, it wouldn’t be as impressive or satisfying as doing it without overpaying players.
My guess is Ohio State wouldn’t be as good this season if the alumni hadn’t poured so much money into the program. I would be more intrigued if all the teams had to spend the exact same amount on their programs because then we would see which teams prepared the best and had the most skill and brain power – instead of which ones spent the most money.
There’s no purity in the current system. It’s professional sports on college campuses where regular students are not professionals. Cultural and lifestyle mismatches are running amok. It feels sordid, fake, inconsistent, and gross.
On the one hand, you want students to learn as non-professionals but you want to pay to have a pro football team to make money for your university.
Buying wins at the college level isn’t compelling. It’s mercenary and shallow. It favors the rich and disadvantages those with less. This isn’t equal opportunity; it’s greed.
College shouldn’t be about professionalism. It should be about college students learning in the classroom and preparing to enter what will be a complicated professional world that, to sort through and navigate, will call upon brainpower.
We need to focus on that a whole lot more.
Winning football games has little to do with training the minds of students to be prepared for the future where artificial intelligence skills will be crucial to delivering workplace value.
All of this is headed in the wrong direction. Greed is intense. Values are being compromised all over. The purpose of a university is to be perverted and bastardized by the lure of money and winning sporting events. These are games. They’re fleeting. They don’t matter much especially compared with students preparing for life after sports.
I believe there are three steps that should be taken to get this wobbly train back on the track.
First, don’t pay athletes to play football. They’re already getting paid through their scholarships. Hold the line. No extra money. If your team loses because you don’t have players, they lose. So be it. It’s just a game. Playing football is not higher education. Reading textbooks, sharpening critical thinking skills, and learning how to problem solve with other people is what the focus should be.
Second, don’t allow any players to transfer and play the next season. Make them sit out a year which will deter many of them from transferring each year as they are now. They don’t want to sit out a season more of them will stay where they are.
Third, cap the salaries of the coaches at something like $200,000. They don’t deserve to be paid millions of dollars a year. They’re football coaches. Chemistry, biology, computer science, and English literature professors are more valuable to students in the long run than coaches.
Higher education has lost its way. It needs to find its way back to the basics: learning, academics, thinking, and synthesizing information.
None of that has a whole lot to do with running a pro football team on campus.
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Sammy Sportface, a sports blogger, galvanizes, inspires, and amuses The Baby Boomer Brotherhood. And you can learn about his vision and join this group's Facebook page here:
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