To be blunt, I hate university sports. The main reason? Two words: opportunity cost.
Take UCLA as an example. They needed to build more parking space. On campus, there are two fields: the football team's practice field, and the intramural field. Guess which was made unavailable for over a year in order to add parking?
Mind you, this is in Westwood, where land is not cheap. Sports facilities directly compete with academic facilities as far as space, and certainly as far as attention of the student body.
For all the loving memories of UCLA's glory days under Wooden, I can't help but feel it is all a big waste of time -- especially considering how amazing the LA Lakers are. Add the option for independent sports clubs, and the need to combine universities with sports establishments shrinks.
Brad
· 3 years ago
I think you should wait for Doug Flutie to retire before calling his career into question.
John P.
· 3 years ago
While I don't want to rain on GMU's parade, I agree with Ivan on this one. Plus, the studies (apparently) do not take into account the *quality* of the added applicants.
Don Mynack
· 3 years ago
While I can see your point, Ivan, you fail to mention that college sports are largely self-supporting, at least the ones people care about (i.e. football and basketball), particularly at a school as large as UCLA. Intramural sports, while a diversion for students, are probably not.
Athletic department budgets have ballooned over the years, true, but that is mostly due to many other sports, the so-called minor sports (basically anything other and football and basketball) taking a larger and larger share of scholarships and related support efforts (staff and facilities). These sports basically eat all the revenue produced from the huge football and basketball contracts, and return little, it any, revenue back to the pot.
Now, if you want to make an argument that all universities should be private entities, and receive much less financial support from the state, I could buy that. Particularly where you end up with situations like in my home state of Texas, where two universities (University of Texas and Texas A & M) receive the lion's share of state appropriations, despite educating a smaller and smaller proportion of the state's college students. This, coupled with a "deregulation" of tuition rates, has produced a result whereby those two universities' systems are swimming in cash, at the expense of just about everybody else. Not good.
Getting back to Russell's point, GMU's run in the NCAA's got me to check out their web site, start looking at grad school options, and seeing all the cool stuff they offer in IT. Unfortunately, they don't offer grad degrees on an online basis, so I have to look elsewhere. However, I would recommend that my friends in the D.C. area (I have a few), look at GMU as an option.
Ivan Kirigin
· 3 years ago
Don Mynack,
Actually, my point wasn't that they lose money, but that they displace other more important activities. Other departments also make lots of money -- computer science will bring in more research funds than many humanities.
Further, I would argue that intramural sports are better for the student body than elite sports. More people play, and intramural rivalries are very healthy. In addition, no students go to college for intramural sports -- so there is no distraction.
I can tell you how many times I've seen athletes beg for extensions on assignments. This is after they get free special tutors to effectively do their homework -- much more attention than anything in the honors program (at UCLA).
That is why I transferred :-D
I went to NYU which is also a large school, with a very diverse student body. T-shirts with “NYU football” are literally a joke. Their honors program was awesome and undergraduate research is very common.
Yep
· 3 years ago
I went to UTexas @ Austin. The school is somewhat odious, but my objection the the athletics there was that the Great State of Texas was running a football team. Why does my state government need to run a football team? And not pay the players?
Mr. Roberts, please forgive my ignorance, but is George Mason public or private?
I'm beginning to find Wikipedia to be faster than Google for very directed searches.
Broocks Wilson
· 3 years ago
The University of Texas at Austin makes enough money of its football program to support itself. Season tickets and donations from alumni are much greater given the overall prowess of the UT football program, which can often leave left over money that goes into the education side of things.
This leads me to Mr. Kirgin's point. If an athlete doesn't want to make the most of an oppurtunity provided to him, that's his own fault. However, sports scholarships do often provide people who wouldn't otherwise have the ability to goto college to attend college, and not just athletes. Because huge programs in basketball like those of Duke and Villanova or say in football, like that of Notre Dame or USC, give the colleges alot more money to put into scholastic scholarships etc.
superdestroyer
· 3 years ago
Many of the commenters need to research big time college sports better.
The first concept to understand is that the Footbal team at UCLA or UT-Austin is not really controlled by the university. It is controlled by the Athletic Foundation that is a separate, not-fort-profit corporation than the university. How else do you think that the head football coaches can receive a greaer salary than the governor and sign shoe deals and get paid for appearing on television.
Second, Athletic Departments are generally money losers. If not for the transfer of stuents fees from the university to the Athletic Departmnet, donations from alumni and hangers-on, and loans from the university that will never be repaid, almost all Athletic programs would lose money. They almost never pay for themselves. They also divert contributions from the academic side of the university to the Separate Athletic Department. See the story of Vanderbilt University eliminating its separate Athletic Department and taking control.
rostow
· 3 years ago
I'm surprised no one mentioned the fact that student athletes usually dilute the academic value of the degree at top schools. Taking students with lower test scores and grades just to have a decent team is common even at the very top schools.
Assume for argument's sake that having champion ditch diggers would put an extra 20 million a year on net in a university's pocket but that champion ditch digging teams require accepting hundreds of students with lower qualifications and making sure that colleges have easy enough majors to get them to graduate. Exactly how does a school such as UCLA (or more pointedly Chicago or MIT) really benefit except financially from expanding the ditch-digging team? If this is the argument, why not have running a casino and card-dealing as majors at CMU or Stanford if it could be shown that such activities brought more money to the school?
I can only hope GMU becomes good enough that it can afford to fall back into basketball mediocrity.
All Comments
To be blunt, I hate university sports. The main reason? Two words: opportunity cost.
Take UCLA as an example. They needed to build more parking space. On campus, there are two fields: the football team's practice field, and the intramural field. Guess which was made unavailable for over a year in order to add parking?
Mind you, this is in Westwood, where land is not cheap. Sports facilities directly compete with academic facilities as far as space, and certainly as far as attention of the student body.
For all the loving memories of UCLA's glory days under Wooden, I can't help but feel it is all a big waste of time -- especially considering how amazing the LA Lakers are. Add the option for independent sports clubs, and the need to combine universities with sports establishments shrinks.
I think you should wait for Doug Flutie to retire before calling his career into question.
While I don't want to rain on GMU's parade, I agree with Ivan on this one. Plus, the studies (apparently) do not take into account the *quality* of the added applicants.
While I can see your point, Ivan, you fail to mention that college sports are largely self-supporting, at least the ones people care about (i.e. football and basketball), particularly at a school as large as UCLA. Intramural sports, while a diversion for students, are probably not.
Athletic department budgets have ballooned over the years, true, but that is mostly due to many other sports, the so-called minor sports (basically anything other and football and basketball) taking a larger and larger share of scholarships and related support efforts (staff and facilities). These sports basically eat all the revenue produced from the huge football and basketball contracts, and return little, it any, revenue back to the pot.
Now, if you want to make an argument that all universities should be private entities, and receive much less financial support from the state, I could buy that. Particularly where you end up with situations like in my home state of Texas, where two universities (University of Texas and Texas A & M) receive the lion's share of state appropriations, despite educating a smaller and smaller proportion of the state's college students. This, coupled with a "deregulation" of tuition rates, has produced a result whereby those two universities' systems are swimming in cash, at the expense of just about everybody else. Not good.
Getting back to Russell's point, GMU's run in the NCAA's got me to check out their web site, start looking at grad school options, and seeing all the cool stuff they offer in IT. Unfortunately, they don't offer grad degrees on an online basis, so I have to look elsewhere. However, I would recommend that my friends in the D.C. area (I have a few), look at GMU as an option.
Don Mynack,
Actually, my point wasn't that they lose money, but that they displace other more important activities. Other departments also make lots of money -- computer science will bring in more research funds than many humanities.
Further, I would argue that intramural sports are better for the student body than elite sports. More people play, and intramural rivalries are very healthy. In addition, no students go to college for intramural sports -- so there is no distraction.
I can tell you how many times I've seen athletes beg for extensions on assignments. This is after they get free special tutors to effectively do their homework -- much more attention than anything in the honors program (at UCLA).
That is why I transferred :-D
I went to NYU which is also a large school, with a very diverse student body. T-shirts with “NYU football” are literally a joke. Their honors program was awesome and undergraduate research is very common.
I went to UTexas @ Austin. The school is somewhat odious, but my objection the the athletics there was that the Great State of Texas was running a football team. Why does my state government need to run a football team? And not pay the players?
Mr. Roberts, please forgive my ignorance, but is George Mason public or private?
GMU @ wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Mason_Unive...>
Public
I'm beginning to find Wikipedia to be faster than Google for very directed searches.
The University of Texas at Austin makes enough money of its football program to support itself. Season tickets and donations from alumni are much greater given the overall prowess of the UT football program, which can often leave left over money that goes into the education side of things.
This leads me to Mr. Kirgin's point. If an athlete doesn't want to make the most of an oppurtunity provided to him, that's his own fault. However, sports scholarships do often provide people who wouldn't otherwise have the ability to goto college to attend college, and not just athletes. Because huge programs in basketball like those of Duke and Villanova or say in football, like that of Notre Dame or USC, give the colleges alot more money to put into scholastic scholarships etc.
Many of the commenters need to research big time college sports better.
The first concept to understand is that the Footbal team at UCLA or UT-Austin is not really controlled by the university. It is controlled by the Athletic Foundation that is a separate, not-fort-profit corporation than the university. How else do you think that the head football coaches can receive a greaer salary than the governor and sign shoe deals and get paid for appearing on television.
Second, Athletic Departments are generally money losers. If not for the transfer of stuents fees from the university to the Athletic Departmnet, donations from alumni and hangers-on, and loans from the university that will never be repaid, almost all Athletic programs would lose money. They almost never pay for themselves. They also divert contributions from the academic side of the university to the Separate Athletic Department. See the story of Vanderbilt University eliminating its separate Athletic Department and taking control.
I'm surprised no one mentioned the fact that student athletes usually dilute the academic value of the degree at top schools. Taking students with lower test scores and grades just to have a decent team is common even at the very top schools.
Assume for argument's sake that having champion ditch diggers would put an extra 20 million a year on net in a university's pocket but that champion ditch digging teams require accepting hundreds of students with lower qualifications and making sure that colleges have easy enough majors to get them to graduate. Exactly how does a school such as UCLA (or more pointedly Chicago or MIT) really benefit except financially from expanding the ditch-digging team? If this is the argument, why not have running a casino and card-dealing as majors at CMU or Stanford if it could be shown that such activities brought more money to the school?
I can only hope GMU becomes good enough that it can afford to fall back into basketball mediocrity.