Game of Life

[flea]

Book read:
James Shulman and William Bowen, The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values (Princeton UP, 2001).
These are the authors who wrote The Shape of the River, using the Mellon Foundation's College and Beyond database to track the changing profile of minority students at elite colleges and their lives after college. This one is about sports, and got a lot of reviews and press when it came out, so the basic messages may be familiar to you: no, almost no college sports program pays for itself much less brings in revenue; at many schools alumni giving does not correlate to sports success (though at some it does); athletes are tending to be increasingly different from their peers in academic preparedness, political philosophy, and life goals, and interestingly this is most visible at the Division II and Ivy League schools; athletes get a much larger admissions advantage than either legacies or minorities, especially at Div. III/Ivy; the entire culture of many college campuses is changing as a result of the increased intensity of athletic recruiting and athletic culture, and especially at Div. III/Ivy schools where athletes are a much larger percentage of the student body (as much as 1/3) than Div. IA schools.

Recent rereads:
Georgette Heyes, The Unknown Ajax
Jennifer Crusie, Welcome to Temptation

Comments

[dxmachina.livejournal.com]

Division III schools recruit? I'm sure they must, but I can't believe one can link them with the Ivies. Two very different athlete pools. Having taught at a Div III and a Div I, I never even noticed an athlete culture at Roger Williams. It was totally opposite what I was used to at URI. I was amazed to find out halfway through the spring semester that I had the basketball team's starting center in my class. I never guessed. He was only 6'3", not very coordinated, and very unjock-like.

[casperflea.livejournal.com]

They talked a lot about Williams, Amherst, schools like that, as having very similar patterns to the Ivies. Those schools recruit very heavily, just not in the same ways that Div. IA schools do. Interestingly, the jock effect at Div. III and Ivies alike is not what many people think of - the vast majority of recruited athletes at these schools are not in basketball and football, but lacrosse, soccer, fencing, swimming, track... and they are MORE likely to be from a high socioeconomic background, have gone to private school, etc., than their classmates, although they tend to have lower SATs, lower college grades, be more conservative, major in econ, be more interested in careers in finance, and be the highest-paid alumni, like all athletes across sports. It's the prep jock effect, not the poor/minority jock effect people imagine based on basketball and football. But at smaller colleges, it's huge.

Also fascinating to me was that Duke spent $4.4 million annually on the football team and only $1.8 million on the basketball (late '90s figures). Huh! Football is damned expensive.

I think you'd like the book - it's very numbers-oriented and hardly a racy read, but the content is often unexpected, and interesting.

[gchick.livejournal.com]

Football is insanely expensive -- dx already touched on the scholarships and Title IX issue (which has sadly been routinely spun as "my sport was cut because of a bunch of meddling chicks"). When the NC State fencing team was cut in (I think) 1992, they went to the athletic office and pointed out that they could add a women's team rather than cutting the men; it's a co-ed sport and they even had a woman head coach at the time, but no go... and then they tried to point out that the whole fencing budget was less than the football line item for athletic tape, with equal luck.

It's not just that football is huge; it's also sacrosanct. As you know having read the book.

I'm not sure that Williams, Amherst, etc are the most typical example of div III schools, since they do share a sort of old-line preppy culture with the Ivies that a lot of other small schools don't.

All interesting. Must read.

[casperflea.livejournal.com]

I think it's that the College and Beyond database covers the old-line preppy places. And it's very deep rich data - back to 1951 (possibly before).

[dxmachina.livejournal.com]

Football is damned expensive.

Yup, and not just economically. It uses up so many scholarships that other sports suffer, particularly since Title IX went into effect. Rather than increase the number of scholarships for women to match what the men had, a lot of schools just cut men's teams. URI cut their excellent (and comparatively cheap to maintain) wrestling program so they wouldn't have to give the "girls" too many scholarships. When people pointed out that we had a football team that usually sucked, and that was sucking up huge amounts of the budget and the scholarships, they were dismissed as crackpots.

It's even been to the detriment of the one team that could excel on occasion, the basketball team. Every time we got a good coach (Tom Penders, Al Skinner), there was never enough money for basic facilities (not to mention salary) to keep him. Meanwhile, football was never short of helmets.