Should colleges offer an athletics major?

My minor was in music history/literature. Ended up with more credit hours in music than I did in my degree field.

 

The Ivy league does it this way, where student-athlete is true statement.

Everyone else in D-I or I-AA uses the BS method to please boosters and promise that maybe a few of these chumps actually can make money doing this in the future and uses athletes as meat for us to be entertained by. We can even make some money on their misery by gambling on them. And I love them for doing it and sacrificing for my pleasure. Don't get me wrong.

Fuck most college football players end up with a battered body anyway and never see a hint of a degree or a pro contract or any common sense.
At least if they pretend and try to get a degree in football or general sports studies they can go to an employer with some idea of how to function in the real world when their sports dream dies.

Of course we could always give those sports scholarships to music and engineering majors but sportswriters would be out of a job and the fantasy leagues aren't nearly as much fun.

 

I would love to teach music someday. Only problem is, the first thing to get cut from schools are always art and music.

 

Yup. Had an offer to be a band director but, as much as I wanted to take it, the principal was honest enough to admit that I could have executed that job to perfection and still not have been invited back the next school year.

Still would like a shot, but public school systems are being ordered to cut spending and/or programs and the fine arts are usually a primary target.

 

Which is a shame, because studies have shown that students involved in music do better in their other classes.

 

It's not a college's damn mission to offer a major that's almost assuredly of no use to 99.99 percent of the students majoring in it. It's not a college's damn mission to teach someone how to handle living in the world and how to get a second set of eyes on a proposed contract. That's the parents'

 

???

Shall we pull out the course catalog of any average state university?

 

Yeah, and I'm sure you'll find that just about any major (if nothing else as a prelaw or pre-MBA major) is something that can be used to make a living for the vast majority of the people majoring in it. Note I said major, not course. On the other hand, the odds of an athletics major actually being a professional athlete are super low.

 

Colorado is 77th in the US News & World reports. (I was going for 75 as an arbitrary number but there were ties) I went to their majors and pulled a few where I think you'd be hard pressed to find more people making a living in their major field than there are professional people working in athletics.

(No offense to any of these majors; I just ain't sure where the jobs are in them. Feel free to point them out.)

eta: Athletics is a pretty broad field if you consider everyone involved in the conducting of an athletics program, college or professional. I don't see how it's gotta be limited to just being a professional athlete.

Anthropology
Art History
Asian Studies
Classics
Dance
English
Environmental Studies
Ethnic Studies
Film Studies
History
Humanities
Media Studies
Music Arts
Open Option (arts and sciences)
Preprofessional Studies (health and law)
Religious Studies
Sociology
Studio Arts
Theatre
Undetermined (business)
Women's Studies

 

What about a coach? Or a trainer? Or working in the front office for a big league or minor league team?
Plenty of directions to go in with this beyond the playing field. Sports is a billion-dollar business. There's a lot more people involved with the operations of a league than just the athletes.

 

For the sake of argument, does a college education have to be job training? What about the intellectual benefits of a good education which can carry over into any number of jobs.

 

Good point. I graduated from a small school that has a solid rep for its business/education schools.

The best and most worthwhile parts of my "education" came outside of the classroom, often outside of my eventual degree choice (mass comm).