“useless degrees” vs college sports

[Chew Toy McCoy]

Branching off the college loan forgiveness...

The same people who rail against “useless degrees” or college in general would probably absolutely lose their shit if sports were removed from college as if it’s a constitutional right, as if playing college sports prepares you for life better than a useless degree or a winning team has anything to do with education level. The opportunity to transition from college sports to professional sports is extremely finite and yet gets the highest respect from some.

It also gets way outsized importance in attention and budget. IMO outside general physical fitness sports should be removed from the “education” system and moved to more of a trade school system. “But then you also can’t get a college degree at the same time.” Right. So pick your priorities and roll of the dice. Sports are the military-industrial complex of higher education.

 

[Alli]

And have lately become more so once you consider the fact that college athletes now get a free education AND can make money from endorsements and such.

I have a love/hate relationship with the whole thing. I love pro football. Can’t stand college ball. Give me honors athletes. That would be special.

 

[lizkat]

Bumped into a tweet by some college prof who noted with a combination of exasperation and scientific interest that each term she has to deal with a different level of unawareness in her students. Her most recent experience was having students who didn't know who Truman Capote was, and never heard of "the band U2". But then she perkily added that at least her job in teaching has helped her keep up with "current celebrities".

So that's the latest hallmark of ability to help fend off cultural illiteracy? Being up on who's trending? Here I was still pegging that to resisting total dismissal of "the Western canon" in American higher education.

 

[mac_in_tosh]

The claim that some of these student athletes are actually students is far fetched in many cases, especially with football since with all the time at practice and traveling to away games it would be hard to keep up with school work. I recently watched a documentary about a football player who achieved his ambition of playing for the same university where his father played. At no time in the show was it mentioned what the guy majored in. So much for the "student" part of student athlete.

It doesn't strain credulity to learn that the Senate candidate in Georgia, Herschel Walker, never actually graduated college. But that didn't stop him from previously claiming that he did. This CNN Politics headline says it all: "Fact check: Herschel Walker falsely claims he never falsely claimed he graduated from University of Georgia"

 

[lizkat]

Back in the early 60s, I made some decent spending money from tutoring college football players in the music library on weeknight evenings. The players in my school did all graduate, having passed among other required humanities courses the one called Music Appreciation 101.

They had to be able to answer some multiple choice questions about music history, and also be able to identify (upon hearing a few bars of the music played in the examination room) the composer, title of work and movement number of a variety of works composed from the 12th through 20th centuries.

Honestly for their sake I hope that some of their other required courses explored the material in a potentially more useful way. Be that as it may have turned out for them, some of the players could probably even have told anyone a decade later which movement of a Beethoven or Brahms symphony was being aired on the radio... mostly thanks to the silly rhymes I'd made up to help them recognize the first 10 or 12 bars of such music in those final exams.

Of course it took me even longer than decades to get those sometimes bawdy "lyrics" and the related earworms out of my own brain. To this day there is one JS Bach Brandenburg Concerto that I will never hear the start of again without bursting into uncontrollable laughter. I actually and regretfully declined to attend a few chamber concerts in NYC for that very reason.