The End of College Sports?
If you are a student or are thinking about going back to school, here is some news that will directly affect your education. Currently, there is a tug of war being waged on college campuses all across America. Feeling the financial pinch, schools have been forced to slash their budgets in order to keep their schools afloat. This directly affects YOU!
Looking for ways to curb their spending, college presidents have been drastically reducing the number of sports teams on campus. What’s on the chopping block? Financial aid, budget cuts for academic departments, and…sports teams.
The prospect of cutting college athletics is making many students, alumni, and faculty members very unhappy. So, it’s time to ask ourselves a few questions: do you think that students have the right to maintain their sports teams? If so, what should they give up instead? Are minor budget cuts from Math and English departments acceptable?
Prospective student-athletes will have to re-think whether they’re going to get that athletic scholarship. Sports teams have the potential to raise millions of dollars for their respective colleges! On the other hand, if colleges trim their budgets by eliminating certain sports teams, more money would be available to help the students who are in need of financial aid. It’s definitely a tough call!
The students here at Top-Colleges certainly have a lot to say about the issue. We’ve selected two of our students to share their thoughts about how they believe the budget cuts will impact their college experience.
Sports Teams for Women
By Candace Jones
Title IX was introduced to college sports teams back in 1972, which gave women the equal opportunity to compete in athletics. Since then, college sports have flourished dramatically over the past three decades. But what do these recent budget cuts mean for female athletes?
Although men and women are given equal opportunity to compete in college athletics, it is still the men’s tournaments that receive the most amounts of funding and sponsorship. Men’s football, basketball, and baseball have traditionally been popular among students, alumni, and corporate sponsors. Advertisers and sponsors want to see a return on their investment in college teams, which is more or less guaranteed in popular male sports.
So, if universities continue to cut sports teams, it is the female athletes who will suffer. Since men’s football and basketball generate the most revenue for their schools, they will probably be the last sports teams to be cut from the budget. Many women’s teams struggle to achieve the same level of support and money, so collegiate women will be more likely to give up their athletic pursuits.
How are women ever supposed to compete and achieve the same level of interest as male athletes if their teams are dismantled? Without the proper funding, college women’s sports and ultimately national women’s sports will ultimately fall behind male-dominated sports.
Scholarships Over Sports
By Vivek Trivdei
While college sports provide students with some great recreational options, athletics should not be a priority. Students need well-funded classes and good instructors who will help them to think critically and ask tough questions. Whether students like it or not, memories of a Final Four game will not be a talking point during an interview and will not help resolve a problem at work!
Furthermore, the overwhelming majority of people that go to college are not student athletes. I agree that student athletes should be given an outlet for pursuing perfection in their sport, but I do not agree with negatively affecting the rest of the student body during that pursuit. Budget money allowing for more classes and better instructors should not be stripped so that a student can play a sport. Not only does that impact the non-student athlete, it damages the athlete when he or she is in a class that could and should have been better funded.
The millions spent on stylizing and sensationalizing these topflight sports is mind-boggling. So much money is spent to make stadiums look like coliseums and home games to look like the Super Bowl. Sure, America is famous for its football, but American students are lagging behind in math, science, and reading. We are the most advanced nation in the history of the world, yet we continue to devolve our students’ potential by stripping money from core courses in college to ensure we have confetti for our basketball teams.
Universities should tap into the major sports’ budgets to help fund the smaller teams so that student athletes can have a chance to follow their dreams. But under no circumstances should we speed the decline of our students’ international standing by giving them even more inferior classes and teachers to instruct them. If we do that, we might as well use their report cards for confetti, although I’m not sure what we would be celebrating.
Filed in: Education News, Sport & Fitness.
I think a sport is very important for a student, fos his self esteem and a stimulus for his studies. A non athletic student obtains his stimulus by reading. Sports are very important why not help students who want to practice a sport, and not smoke or take drugs?
Dennisse,
Your comment is very interesting. The points you make all talk about “practicing” sports and stimulating studies. Couldn’t extracurricular activities address these points just as well? I believe in having a well balanced lifestyle — studying should not be the only activity an individual does during their four years in college. Such is why extra-curricular activities exist. Recreation teams and sports clubs address your two points extremely well in my opinion. A student, athletic or non-athletic, can compete in his or her sport of choice in an organized and passionate way without having funding taken away from academic classes. All the while, student stimulation and self-esteem are available by the handful. However, what is also available by the handful with structured university sports franchises are steroids, a point you failed to mention. Athletes, wanting to push the bounds of their bodies, are injecting themselves in illegal, and as a result, more covert ways so that they can try to be the best they can be. Furthermore, a 2001 study done by the National Collegiate Athletics Association shows that 27.1% of college athletes use marijuana. Note, this is not a statistic for other drugs such as cocaine or nicotine. Therefore, athletics do not really have that much of an effect on drug use by students, and if anything, spurs on the interest of taking such illegal drugs as anabolic steroids.
I understand the spirit of your comment – I just think that students can get the same thrill and stimulation from non-fund sapping sports as they can from the established sports discussed in the blog above.