There is a college called Clemson that plans to build a sports center for their football players worth $55 million. It includes a 9 hole golf course, sand volleyball courts, bowling lanes just for starters. An “arms race” is on between American colleges to lure good football players with stellar athletic facilities, In 2014, according the the Washington Post, 48 colleges in the five wealthiest conferences in college sports, spent a staggering $772million on the pampering of athletes, an 89% increase from the $408 million spent in 2004, adjusted for inflation. Football stadiums and basketball arenas are complemented by practice facilties, fancy locker rooms, players’ lounges with HD TVs and video game facilities.
Gradually disappearing is any discussion of academic rigor or good teaching. Rigor means hard work and tough grading. The important thing is to fill the college with full-paying students for financial reasons. To be cynical, that allows the administrators to continue to pay themselves handsomely. The people who pay for this are the students, deep in debt, and the parents who help pay the fees. Lucky are those with scholarships.
This cannot go on indefinitely. The college industry is a bubble ready to burst. What will cause it to finally implode burst, one suspects, is twofold: when industry starts to worry that job applicants with supposed excellent degrees are not very well educated; and secondly, when prospective students decide that being in debt for years for the sake of being lectured to by teaching assistants (and meeting with a professor only rarely) is not worth the cost, a cost being grossly inflated by the ridiculous emphasis on college sport.
Don’t get me wrong – sport is an important component of education. I was introduced to rowing at university myself, thoroughly enjoyed it, and ended up in n excellent crew. But it should be treated like any other “subject” and kept in proportion.
I’m very glad I go to university in the UK, where sport is kept in check. Even at my university of Exeter, the most sporty university in the country, the sports are nowhere near as well funded as the arts or the sciences. Sport is a wonderful feature of life: Wimbledon and the Oxford-Cambridge boat race are two of my highlights of the year. But ultimately, sport does not have the capacity to improve public policy the way political science does, or to improve medicine the way biology does, or to grow the economy the way economics does. While it may be fun, it is not as socially useful. America diverts a disproportionate sum of money to sport at its peril.