TNR: 'Don't Send Your Kids to the Ivy League'

My son, who has played four games of mopup duty in high school, has gotten letters from at least seven colleges asking him about playing football. Granted, this is hardly hard-core recruiting, though I did get a Father's Day card from the football coach at Hope College. Just for kicks, my son went to an evaluation camp at Augustana (Ill.) College, and as we toured the facilities, I counted the number of names on the wall -- 120, including 10 safeties (my son's position). The total enrollment is 2,500. The people at Augustana were very forthright -- they were selling that you get to "continue your passion" in college. Of course, that's as long as you don't mind paying for the privilege. I saw a story that one small college in Ohio -- I can't remember which -- ended up with $3 million in extra tuition money as a result of adding football.

 

TNR is kind of a repository for Ivy Leaguers recovering from "toxic levels of fear, anxiety, and depression” they get by going to the country's best schools. I expect all of these people will eventually clean themselves up and get respectable jobs as investment bankers and hedge fund managers.

 

Was that piece a TNR staff editorial?

 

A close friend of mine was a D3 head basketball coach - private school with 35k tuition - before he moved up the ladder. He kept 19 kids on his squad. Nine played a lot. Three a little in blowouts and seven didn't see more than one minute the entire season.

He even admitted he kept a bloated roster for this exact purpose.

The lower levels of Division 3 strike me as a place where the colleges say athletics are focused on the student-athlete but, really, it's about "playing student-athlete" for plenty of kids who would probably be better off dialed in on their studies instead of practicing 15 hours a week and never playing.

 

The only reason my son considered it is because he wants to teach and coach someday, so he thought maybe it might be good to say he "played" college football, even if he didn't see the field. Also, the schools are great at selling you that maybe you will play someday. At Augustana, there's a blown-up version of the letter Ken Anderson wrote asking for a tryout (the coach said he could come and play defensive back. That coach was gone two years after Anderson's arrival).

 

I had never thought of adding football to bring in revenue to a small Division 3 school. That's brilliant, actually.

I covered a 1,200-student D3 school in a previous life without football. Saw they added it a few years ago. Let's say that grants and aid brings the tuition price down to $20,000 a year, per student. With 60 kids on a team, that's $1.2 million dollars coming in per year -- for a program that draws, oh, 200 paying customers a game. If you have 80 kids, make it $1.6 million.

 

Man oh man, that is genius. I know enough people who keep their kids around the local JC for a couple of years solely to extend the athletic career. If they could find a spot on a four-year college team, they'd pay for it in a heartbeat.

 

Which is especially good for these schools, because Augustana readily acknowledged nobody had probably heard of it until you stepped on campus. My son has been "recruited" by the following schools, zero of which he had ever heard of:

Augustana
Millikin
Missouri Baptist (NAIA, which allows only 24 scholarships)
Bowdoin
Hope
Robert Morris (Illinois, which recently started up football)
Norwich (Vermont)

And probably a few others.

By the way, hardcore D-3 people get really pissy when you point out that schools are trying to stuff their rosters with wanna-bes. Sure, the starters probably were legitimately recruited. (One of my son's former teammates, a three-year starter, is playing at old tony's fave, UW-Whitewater, this fall.) But the benchwarmer wearing the duplicate uniform number listed in the program as 5-foot-5, 140 pounds? Uh, no.

 

Bowdoin is a good school.

 

Yeah that's an odd one to show up on that list. It's one of the so-called Little Ivies.

 

Not all D3s are equal. The Wisconsin schools are all publics with big enrollments.

They'd be I-AA anywhere else but something about the Wisconsin legislature and how they fund is why they're D3s.

And some of the D3s have such huge endowments, the playing field isn't level. My brother, who is also a D3 SID complains all the time.

Anyway, the other big sport is wrestling. Twenty kids, all playing full freight and for many of them, like at the GFs school, the tuition is less than the check the parents wrote for their prep school education.

The kids who are serious about medical/law/MBA school for postgrad know that being an athlete is a resume boost and a big one. They're gaming the system to play sports and get entry into a graduate program.

Smart and the investment is worth it, if they have a marginal MCAT/LSAT/Etc. and good but not perfect grades.

Texas is driving the whole damn thing anyway. That state has more high school students in it then say Arkansas or Mississippi or