In the wake of academic scandals involving the Auburn football program, Inside Higher Ed reports on a study looking at the majors of athletes. The results will be shocking to, well basically no-one who has ever set foot on a college campus:
While accusations of widespread abuse like that alleged at Auburn are unusual, "clustering" of athletes -- in which large numbers of athletes at an institution major in a particular program or department, out of proportion to other students at the college -- is common. A 2002-3 analysis by USA Today found that a large percentage of football players at Auburn and Duke University (a quarter and a third of the teams, respectively) majored in sociology, while tiny fractions of all undergraduates majored in that field. At North Carolina State, the University of Michigan and University of Southern Mississippi, the most popular major among football players tended to be sports management, also far out of proportion with their peer students.
Really? Football players majoring in sports management at a higher rate than non-athletes? Well, that's clearly impossible without institutional corruption. Round up the usual suspects, Captain Renault!
(More after the cut)
Are athletes deliberately seeking out easier majors? Almost certainly-- they've already got huge demands on their time, and they'd be fools not to look for easier classes. Practically every student does this, in one form or another-- when I was doing my physics thesis, I made a concerted effort to find non-science classes that would require the minimum possible amount of work, so I could spend more time in the lab.
And the whole basis of comparison here is screwy. If you want to look for a sign of corruption or favoritism in this, the proper comparison is not between football players and the general student population, but between football players and other large groups of people with common interests. Even in the absence of pressures from the athletic department, it would be reasonable to expect the football players might have other things in common that would lead them to major in the same subjects. "Clustering" of football players in sociology or sports management shouldn't be any more surprising than "clustering" of pre-meds in biology or chemistry.
In a rare reversal of the normal order, the voice of sanity comes from Wally Renfro, an official of the NCAA:
"I'm just not sure what it proves," he says. "It suggests there's something inherently wrong with athletes [clustering] in certain majors, and I'm not sure there's something inherently wrong there."
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I suspect there are certain majors that are at least tacit set-asides for athletes at most colleges with strong football or basketball programs. (Maybe some other sports, too.) I also suspect that student athletes get special treatment in those majors. If there is any reason for complaint, it should be the special treatment. However, if you accept the fact that big college football and basketball programs need players that are in most respects professionals who need an excuse for being students, it's a lot easier to accept special treatment. Whether public schools should do that is another question, but that's not an issue that's likely to cause much heartburn.
Clustering around sports management sounds about right to me. Now if the cluster was around astrophysics I might be suspicious. But even if it did, that doesn't prove anything.
Clustering by itself does not sound like an incredible problem, until you try to put this fact in context. How many schools w/o teams in first division sports even have a sports management major? one at least suspects that it is not only students trying to take the easiest possible courses (which I do not see as legitimate BTW, but it is not a matter of choice for them, and in any event are easy courses so clustered?). Given the incredible financial pressures involved one can at least suspect that the explanation is that some unusually easy programs are created to keep athletes eligible.
Bottom line for me, there is no reason for universities to own professional sports teams, which is what division I teams are (lower divisions are usually fine). The effort to have them has a corrupting effect on the academic mission of the university. It is also done by exploitation of the athletes themselves, which just make the whole thing even more corrupt...
(maybe going overseas is the answer for a young aspiring athlete- you get paid for your work, you don't have to pretend you're a scholar, and when time comes you can enroll in the academic program of your choice).
In other news, a nearly 100% correlation was found between physics majors and students who chose physics as a major.
At Vandy, the most common major for Physics is "HOD", or "Human Orgainzational Development." In Arts & Science, the education college as a whole has a reputation of being a "lesser" school with "dumb" students. This is highly unfortunate, in my view. I have had a number of HOD students in my introductory astronomy class who were among the top students. One year, *the* top student was a woman who was an HOD major. (Of course, she wasn't on the football team... to my knowledge, she wasn't on any athletic team.) I also believe that the HOD program at Vanderbilt has a pretty good reputation, and some people actively seek it out.
It's probably pretty hard to major in physics and slack off, just doing what's necessary to pass and get through. Physics is a "hard" subject in that a lot of the concepts you have to wrap your brain around are concepts that our brains didn't evolve to find intuitive. However, I think that there are probably quite a number of majors where you can phone it in and just pass-- or you could really put energy into it and get a whole lot out of it.
-Rob
At Vandy, the most common major for Physics is "HOD"
What an idiot I am.
That was supposed to be, "the most common major for football players."
The most common major for physics is left as an exercise for the alert reader.
-Rob
There are some exceptions. One of the smartest guys I know played with the Queen's University (Kingston, Ontario) Golden Gaels as a student. I met some of his teammates, and they were exceptionally intelligent lads, majoring in physics, economics, chemistry, etc.
Not to mention frickin' _HUGE_.
I spent a year at Clarkson University, an engineering-oriented school which is the home of a usually excellent Division I hockey team (the other teams were/are Div III); most of the hockey players seemed to major in Management or Marketing, although there was the odd Electrical or Mechanical Engineer. This fits in with what other commenters and Chad have said; that students with a large time-and-effort demand on one area will try to minimize the time they have to spend in other areas (and engineering programs do seem to take up a lot of a student's time). On the other hand, at Williams, from where I graduated the same year as Professor Orzel (yes, we did know each other, Chad, and I think I even know to whom you were referring in a somewhat recent post about those few who took partying too seriously and flunked out), many of the athletes majored in various time-and-effort intensive fields in the sciences and got prestigious awards such as Rhodes Scholarships at rates which seemed similar to the student population at large; although Williams is a Div III school, it's very sports-oriented and has won the Sears Trophy or Director's Cup (or whatever they call it these days) for best overall sports performance 10 of the 11 years it's been given out, so presumably the athletes do put a lot of time and effort into their respective sports.
The problem is not clustering around majors; it is, and has always been, special treatment afforded to what are essentially 'pro' athletes on college campuses. The author of the original seems to refer to a recent scandal in which football players seem to have taken no-show tutorial (one-on-one) classes with a certain professor in order to maintain eligibility, but such scandals have nothing to do with what football or basketball players actually major in (excepting that the prof was in the sociology department).
On the other hand, at Williams, from where I graduated the same year as Professor Orzel (yes, we did know each other, Chad, and I think I even know to whom you were referring in a somewhat recent post about those few who took partying too seriously and flunked out), many of the athletes majored in various time-and-effort intensive fields in the sciences and got prestigious awards such as Rhodes Scholarships at rates which seemed similar to the student population at large
Now I'm going to spend the afternoon trying to figure out who you are...
Even at Williams, there were a few athletes ducking tough classes-- I remember a joke that the degree with honors in American studies required either a 100-page thesis or rushing for 1,000 yards in a season-- but it was a lot different. The guys on the rugby team still thought I was crazy for majoring in Physics and doing an honors thesis, but most of my classmates on the club were doing their own theses in other subjects...
But, of course, there were also non-athletes who chose most of their classes on the basis of what they thought would require the least work. Laziness is universal.
The problem is not clustering around majors; it is, and has always been, special treatment afforded to what are essentially 'pro' athletes on college campuses. The author of the original seems to refer to a recent scandal in which football players seem to have taken no-show tutorial (one-on-one) classes with a certain professor in order to maintain eligibility, but such scandals have nothing to do with what football or basketball players actually major in (excepting that the prof was in the sociology department).
Absolutely.
I will give you a hint, of sorts, actually two. One, my guess for one of the flunked-out partiers would be Scooby (another would be a certain Martin, who managed to do so twice). And two, while I wasn't a rugger, I did hang out with the rugby team a lot, especially when WUFO was soft for a couple years.
It's interesting how, at least at Williams, the party-heavy club sports (rugby and, some years at least, WUFO) did seem to contain a lot of honors thesis-types. WUFO seemed to have a lot of bio, chem, and physics majors when I was there who went on to either med school or grad school in those or related subjects.
Hopefully the above hints, overt and embedded, will help.