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  They don’t discuss academic rigor or good teaching. In 2014, according the the Washington Post, 48 colleges in the five wealthiest conferences in college sports, spent a staggering $772 million 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 facilities,fancy locker rooms, players’lounges with HD TVs and video games.

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 draw large salaries. The people who foot the bill for this are the students, deep in debt, and their parents, who help pay the fees, whether either are interested in sport or not.

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, partly for the sake of college sporting reputation, and then being taught by poorly paid adjunct professors and teaching assistants instead of full professors – all this is not worth the cost.