Time to end the charade

Chronicle of Higher Education has an op/ed that comes out in favor of letting athletes major in sports.

http://chronicle.com/article/End-the-Charade-Let-Athletes/135894/

The basic premise is the first two years of college would be the same basic classes freshmen and sophomores would take. Junior and Senior years would athletic specific and would include things like contract law, public speaking, etc.

This seems like a good idea to me.

Thoughts from the peanut gallery?

 

Not sure this would work.

Most college basketball players, assuming they know they're good enough to go pro, stay just one year. What kind of classes would they take in that one year? And most of the players who do stay four years don't go pro.

 

I think it works quite well. The players who are staying four years and not going pro are taking the third- and fourth-year classes such as contract law and public speaking and working in the coaching or management or agent kind of fields. Meanwhile, taking first-year classes such as English and math and history and geography can't be anything but helpful for the kids who are going pro after one or two years.

 

It would work like an art degree in today's society would work. Some hit the jackpot, most will be in bread lines or call centers or at the most, selling cars.

 

Would like someone to ask Krzyzewski how many classes his players miss?

 

This line basically summed up the ridiculousness of this piece:

.

First off, he uses the term young men who enter collegiate sports. There are considerable amount of men, and women too (are they eligible for the major?), who play sports because they either want to have fun, or because of the scholarship, which they're using for a real major. The writer fails to differentiate between the star football and basketball players and kids who are just looking for the scholarship, or to enjoy playing the other sports.

Second, while a lot of kids dream of making the pros, only about 1 percent ever do. And as Gator pointed out earlier on here, for the NBA, those kids are just staying the one year. Which means that, 1 percent of the football players will make the NFL, while other kids are going to be stuck with a degree that, unless they become an agent or a coach, which also has a low success rate, will be just as useless.

 

Did you guys miss the part where this was an optional major for student-athletes, not a mandatory major?

Athletes who, as the old commercial goes, "turn pro in something other than sports" could still major in whatever the hell they want.

But for those who aren't interested in pre-med (or was it pre-law?) or a humanities degree, they could use this path to learn skills that might better suit their aspirations.

 

"Optional". That's a good one. Robert Smith laughs.