Despite a tough loss last night, the Cavaliers’ Friday win is still cause for celebration; it gave Virginia its first Elite Eight appearance since 1995. This win was so major that coach Tony Bennett earned a $250,000 bonus for it, on top of his previous $300,000 in bonuses this season. What’s more staggering is the over $1 billion in yearly ad revenue that March Madness generates, which eclipses the NFL playoff ad revenue totals, including the Super Bowl. And it’s not just coaches and ads: even the ladder used in the net cutting ceremony after the championship has an official sponsor. Those who profit from college athletics do so at the expense of individuals who have limited freedoms in their academic lives. While there are valid arguments against paying college athletes, both supporters and opponents of amateurism should be able to agree it is unreasonable for student-athletes to be as restricted as they are in their pursuit of an education — especially under the pretense that college students are not paid in order for them to obtain a quality educational experience.
The tendency for college athletes to “cluster” in a few majors suggests student-athletes have limited academic freedom in order to accommodate their intensive sports schedules. Criticism of clustering emerged in 2008 after a USA Today report found that athletes on hundreds of teams are overrepresented in one major at their colleges. A 2014 probe into the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s athletic department found that for more than 18 years, school academic advisors encouraged student-athletes to take “sham classes” in order to inflate their grades and maintain their athletic eligibilities. And in 2014, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette found that communications and administration of justice accounted for 64.7 percent of the University of Pittsburgh’s football team’s majors. Whether student-athletes are explicitly steered to a few majors by coaches and advisors or whether their commitment to athletics make them select lighter majors, it is clear that for many of these individuals, athletics drives academics and not the other way around.
This information is particularly concerning given that very few student-athletes end up in professional sports leagues. A 2014 survey of more than 600 student-athletes at Big Ten Conference and Mid-American Conference universities found that 29.9 percent of the athletes did not have majors aligned with their future aspirations. For example, one student-athlete reported majoring in history but wanting to work in finance. Another studied healthcare service administration with the intention to return “back to school and get a degree in a field I'm actually interested in.” These anecdotes are representative of roughly one third of student-athletes. Though fifth-year Batten student Malcolm Brogdon excels on and off the court, there’s a reason his success is so widely publicized.
In this case, the NCAA is to blame — its strict rules punishing schools which do not have high student-athlete retention and graduation rates have arguably worsened educational quality. The NCAA should reform its rules so that student-athletes can graduate in six rather than five years while still remaining eligible for four years of athletics, as University of Tennessee Prof. Robin Hardin has previously argued. This change would allow student-athletes with heavy athletic commitments to better distribute their course load in fields in which they are actually interested and that may serve them better later in life.
If student-athletes are first and foremost students, then the NCAA and participating colleges should treat them as such. Education should not be peripheral to athletic performance, especially when it’s the main form of compensation for student-athletes’ hard work.
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