78.42% of statistics are made up on the spot.
8 Likes
Pro or con? Because most college athletic departments are either fully funded by their revenue sports (primarily football and men’s basketball) or they don’t have much expense in the athletic department.
1 Like
As with most of those title questions, the answer is no. It doesn’t really apply anyway since, as far as I understand, the proposal is about public institutions.
Bzzzzzzt. Try again:
Seriously, stop making things up just because you are too lazy to do the research or pushing some agenda.
1 Like
2 Likes
Definitely not against sports, but also definitely against prioritizing sports over education. I wasn’t aware that it was fully funded, but it is definitely the gorilla in the room when it comes to attention, allocations, and acreage at schools like the one I attended (Florida).
2 Likes
I remember asking some German students why they were paying to go to a Canadian university when they could go to University in Germany for free. They told me that you get what you pay for. They said that German university students were just there for parties and useless time-wasting degrees. They wanted a real education. This was back in the early 90s so hard to say what it is like now.
I also remember talking to a Canadian who had given up his basketball scholarship in the USA to come back to Canada. When asked why, he said that the US school would not let him take certain degrees and wanted him to get a degree in Communications. He realized that this was useless and wanted to take Biochemistry so he dropped the scholarship and moved back home to Canada. On the plus, he was a welcome member to the school basketball team.
2 Likes
Sports teams are the biggest waste of university money.
“Oh but it brings in so much money!”
Which is then spent on paying for the tuition of student athletes, stadiums and sexual misconduct lawsuits.
Self perpetuating cycle of spending money on a program that demands all the money it is claimed to be making in the first place.
It has nothing to do with academics and everything to do with being a free feeder league for professional sports organizations that should be paying for this kind of stuff itself.
7 Likes
Well yes, obviously. It’s just we have “tax payers” who make between tens and hundreds of millions of dollars a year who aren’t paying their fair share.
We can rebuild the middle class and make the obscenely (as in it’s literally obscene and wrong) wealthy pay for it. It wouldn’t even negatively impact their spending power in any meaningful way.
6 Likes
I did a quick back-of-the envelope calculation. Seem like the per-year cost of 20K for each of the current crop of students would be a little bit less than one F-35. So, point in favor for free tuition and many points against the F-35.
5 Likes
The rich and powerful never paid the same cost as the rest of us. This has been the case for thousands of years really. In feudal society a farmer pays for wars with crops and the lives of his children, the land owner pays with gold. Which is more valuable?
I see no way out without regulations up to and perhaps including the dissolution of the corporate construct. When the law ceases to serve society, it is a bad law.
1 Like
That is NOT what that is about do not try to avoid the topic and hand wave a reply that is bullshit
Neither of my grandfather’s attended college. Both were successful and managed to have decent paying jobs to own a home, raise families and retire at a decent age. My father never got a college degree either and during the 60’s and 70’s he did just fine becoming a sales vp.
In today’s age you need a college degree to just be a phone rep for many companies. SO the base line of “minimum education” has shifted. A High School diploma is no longer the floor. A BA/BS IS.
And THAT is why it should be at no cost at this stage.
4 Likes
This is not close to true. There are only a handful of universities where the athletic departments break even or better, and even this is probably dubious. Those that do break even need the bottom half of their leagues to subsidize these same sports so they have teams to play and beat. So Indiana, which got trounced by Ohio State today, is funneling their student fees to field a football team nobody watches so that OSU can win 10 games this season. NCAA DII and DIII generally use sports as a recruitment tool, but it seems like they also funnel money out of the educational mission.
2 Likes
Oh, I agree. It wouldn’t be much of a shift to make the revenue sports, still tied to the school, into minor league professional teams. School still gets the revenue, the kids that want to get an education there can still do so (and actually make more money), while the kids who aren’t interested in school can purse their sport. It might also just give the arm’s length distance that would prevent some of the real problems that schools have when they also run a minor-league sports team while pretending to be an institution of higher learning.
2 Likes
I wouldn’t mind seeing numbers on that, if you have them. I’ve seen some for a high-level D1 private school and for 3 D1 state schools, and not only do the revenue sports pay for the full budget of the athletic department, they pay into the school’s general fund.
Yes, with a free university education, you can waste your time on partying and get an “useless” degree. But you have the exact same issues with American universities and students, too.
It’s not that “you get what you pay for”, it’s that what you get out of your time at an university depends on how seriously you take your studies, and what you put into it. Maybe it was easier for those Germans to stay focused when they were attending for-pay Canadian university, I don’t know. But I’m certain that having to pay for your university education does not, by itself, mean you get more out of it than if you went to an university for free.
8 Likes
Meaningless poll in a way since only a bare majority of American citizens vote and a minority of Americans aged 18-29 bother to cast a ballot. “In the 2014 midterms, a miserable 12 percent of eligible 18-to-21-year-old college and university students participated in the election. In 2016, with a highly controversial presidency at stake, less than half of college undergraduates voted.”:
Paid for community college myself. I couldn’t handle how unstructured the environment was. Wasted 2 years, didn’t understand that the social aspect was important. Only thing I learned was how to roll cigarettes one-handed.
At the time I had a ton of GET credits already paid for by my grandmothe. But I didn’t use them because I wanted to do everything my way and they came with stipulations.
After flunking all my classes for two years out of pocket I went to a trade school, for free (nothing out of pocket for me, all paid for with GET credits) and earned a degree on time with good grades and a few academic achievement awards. Tur s out whether or not I was paying didn’t mean nearly as much as there being a structured program that I could adhere to.
7 Likes
Oh yeah, that makes a huge difference for a lot of people. I know I would have benefited from a more structured university experience, especially at first.
4 Likes
You do what every other country does: fail them. The idea that all college students must pass their degrees is itself connected to the commercialised education-as-consumer-product mindset created by the hyper-capitalistic US system.
Have you considered that the apparently sub-par standard of US undergrads might have something to do with the fact that entry to US colleges is overly biased towards financial privilege rather than academic merit?
12 Likes
I completed all my degrees in a college system designed by communists and, yup, the solution to students not taking things seriously is to kick them out of school so hard they leave a vapor trail. One interesting fact is that, if your students aren’t your source of income, you get to have uncompromising standards. I attended plenty of classes with a 3% pass rate. Excellent teacher, competently taught, but just hard. You worked like mad or you failed.
Honestly, I do wish America a college system free at the point of delivery though I suspect the students won’t enjoy it very much. To make it work, you see, colleges have to be a lot more spartan (not uncomfortable, just utilitarian), rigidly gated by academic ability (since places have to be far more limited since you can’t fund them with ever-ballooning debt), and a lot more challenging since you need to make sure only the people making maximum use of the education available are staying around.
Still, much better a short interval of ultimately-improving educational hardship, then a lifetime of ultimately-destructive financial hardship.
6 Likes
