Professionalizing college sports – and fixing Title IX

Last updated on: March 31, 2014 at 9:08 pm by Jane the Actuary

Professionalizing college sports – and fixing Title IX 2014-03-31T21:08:00-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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Unfinished post #2.

It’s a two-fer.

This is what I’d like to see happen with college sports.

Imagine that, somehow, the revenue-generating college sports become de facto minor league teams, sponsored by the colleges but with paid athletes who may or may not choose to take classes in the off-season either at that college or at a nearby community college. Colleges don’t have to maintain the pretense that these players are students, the government can collect the now-lost tax revenue, and students can negotiate their pay and working conditions, either via a union or by the simple matter of accepting the best job offer from multiple schools.

If those teams — presumably basketball and football, maybe hockey at some schools — which consistently generate profit for the school, rather than receiving revenue that more or less covers expenses, are for-profit teams which just happen to be sponsored by universities for tradition’s sake, then they’d be excluded from the bean-counting about men and women participating in sports at the collegiate level, wouldn’t they? And the reports about men’s sports (either at the varsity or club or intramural level) being dropped to meet Title IX requirements for parity between men’s and women’s offerings ought to die down, right?

that’s as far as I made it. Because, if you think about it, the idea of university-provided scholarships for any sport, or Institutional Aid of whatever kind, isn’t really justifiable, for public universities at least. (For private universities, where the scholarships are funded by donors, it’s a bit different.) After all, the cash either comes from other students, or from state funding. In the latter case, scholarships for out-of-state students should be completely out of the question, and for in-state students, if the state government has made the decision to provide support for university students, there are fairer and more transparent ways of accomplishing this than having the universities dole out the money.

On the other hand, I got a big fat scholarship as an undergrad, and the university’s approach was that they were the second-most selective university in the state, where the top students in the state generally went to the most selective university — so the scholarships were the school’s way of recruiting top students, with an expected benefit for the university and the entire student body.

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