Colleges across the country can start making money by churning out intellectual athletes. A plan approved last Thursday by the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s Division I Board of Directors is going to pay colleges up to $100,000 each if their athletes do well in the classroom. The biggest payouts will be reserved for programs that make improvements in graduating players. After all, as the NCAA suggests, this economic incentive is part of a plan to get more athletes to graduate from their respective universities.
Although this effort by the NCAA seems good on the surface, it is filled with erroneous and misleading messages and attempts to fix the broken arm of college athletics with an bandage.
Does it strike anyone as odd that the NCAA is paying institutions of higher learning in order to graduate college students? Since when aren’t universities supposed to be doing this in the first place? Why then should universities be rewarded for simply showing progress in their promise to their student-athletes?
The fact is that the NCAA public relations battle gets exponentially worse as college athletes continue to generate millions of dollars each year for their particular campuses in ticket sales, television network agreements and merchandise (not to mention boosters and donors which help fund the sport). All the while, student athletes are rewarded with at most a fraction of what each campus generates in scholarship money. College coaches are paid millions in order to win games. The stakes for college athletics have never been higher.
This program confirms what regular students have known for a long time: Student-athletes, especially those participating in the big money sports, are not like the rest of us. Many of the participants in the smaller sports can legitimately be called “student-athletes,” but when it comes to the sports bringing in the dough, it is much more difficult to use this term. Basketball and football, among others, have become like full-time jobs for many athletes, to the point where much more time is spent on the practice field and the weight room than in the library or with tutors. These habits are encouraged by universities, who send a conflicting message to students and athletes alike: these students are athletes first and students second…
Furthermore, the money the NCAA promises to give universities (at most $100,000) is much less than these institutions can obtain with a successful, winning team of athletes that might not graduate. The benefits of focusing on athletics do not outweigh the potential financial gain that comes with winning. In this case, throwing money at the problem will not help the situation.
Instead of offering incentives to allow for athletic achievement, the NCAA and individual universities have rearranged their priorities, dishing out penalties to athletics departments obsessed with winning.
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