Our athletes are too smart
Arizona Cardinals running back Edgerrin James left the University of Miami not only without a degree, but without the ability to form a grammatically correct sentence. Since Pat Fitzgerald started coaching the Northwestern football team, every one of his scholarship athletes has come in articulate and come out with a degree.
“That’s who we are,” said Fitzgerald. “Myself as a head coach, we as a staff and us as a program embrace who we are and what we stand for at Northwestern.”
Everyone thinks that’s a good thing.
Everyone thinks it’s a good thing that athletes here are held to the same academic standards as other Northwestern students; that to be recruited by Northwestern, an athlete has to have a high GPA and take more difficult classes than his or her peers.
Everyone thinks it’s a good thing that Kevin Coble, the star of the Wildcat basketball team, had a 4.4 GPA during his senior year of high school, and everyone thinks that it’s okay that our sports teams aren’t better because Northwestern is willing to sacrifice athletic success for academic reputation.
“I think that’s something that separates us from a lot of the other schools out there,” said Coble.
No one sees the whole picture because no one fully comprehends the correlation between academic success and social capital. No one realizes that Northwestern’s athletic scholarships are for people who are in the same economic bracket as the typical upper-middle class Northwestern student, or that our scholarship athletes would have gone to college, even if they weren’t Division I caliber athletes.
Our university is so busy trying to uphold its academic standards that it doesn’t realize it’s limiting social mobility.
The American dream is impossible without a given amount of social capital. That’s a sociological problem that will take an innumerable amount of time to fix. But sports have been, and still are, a way to circumvent that problem at other universities.
Bob Sanders, an Indianapolis Colts safety, was born in Erie, Penn. to a family of 10. His father was a foundry worker. In 2000, Sanders was given a scholarship to the University of Iowa, and he left the school in 2003 with a degree in African-American and World Studies. By 2007, he had won a defensive player of the year award, and his $37.5 million contract gives him significantly more social capital than his father.
Thomas Jones, the New York Jets’ starting tailback, was born into a coal mining family in Virginia. His mother worked the midnight shift for almost twenty years to support her seven children. In 1996, Jones received a scholarship to the University of Virginia, and in 1999 he left UVA for the NFL with a bachelor’s degree in psychology. Last season, he was the NFL’s fifth-leading rusher.
Northwestern can give players like Sanders and Jones opportunities if they lower their academic standards for athletes. They can facilitate social mobility instead of preventing it like the rest of society.
If Northwestern lowered their academic standards, not every scholarship athlete would graduate. There would be players like Edgerrin James at NU, but there would also be athletes like Sanders and Jones — athletes who were willing to work on the field and in the classroom, who took advantage of an opportunity through sports and managed to obtain a degree of higher learning, who raised their social capital and increased their children’s ability to succeed.
Northwestern can give athletes like Sanders and Jones opportunities, but instead the university puts all of their coaches at a recruiting disadvantage, and keeps the lower class at a permanent disadvantage.
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Read more from sports writer Stephen Boyle here. Or you can return home.
Stephen, the problem is those other schools the athletes don’t really learn anything while they’re there. They might as well skip college and go straight to the NFL…they have the ability. Most of College Football serves as a minor league for the NFL. Very few athletes care about class.
Also, our football team went to a bowl game and the basketball team went to the NIT and beat the national runner ups on the road. Not to mention…softball, women’s tennis, lacrosse, men’s golf, men’s tennis, wrestling, women’s swimming, men’s soccer, etc. all had or are having pretty darn good years with our academic standards…so I would say our athletics are doing JUST FINE thank you very much.
I’m sick and tired of people hating on NU athletics when the fact of the matter is our overall athletic department is one of the strongest in the country.
I am proud to say I go to a University where I would say 95 percent of the athletes here care about class.
I’d like to keep it that way.
Aaron Morse
May 4, 2009 at 11:45 pm
Also, the Bob Sanders argument makes no sense. He went to a private high school where he would have gotten all the academic support he needed.
Aaron Morse
May 4, 2009 at 11:54 pm
Hey buddy. We’re a university. A pretty good one. Why should be sacrifice academic standards for a select few?
And what is this talk of social mobility? Let me quote a great SI article for you:
“By the time they have been retired for two years, 78% of former NFL players have gone bankrupt or are under financial stress because of joblessness or divorce.
Within five years of retirement, an estimated 60% of former NBA players are broke.”
The system fails these athletes by not adequately preparing them for the real world that they so often enter after their brief forays into the professional leagues. Lowering academic standards is not a solution.
Bob Loblaw
May 4, 2009 at 11:57 pm
Just in case you think I’m making this up:
http://cnnsi.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&title=Recession+or+no+recession%2C+many+NFL%2C+NBA+and+Major+League+-+03.23.09+-+SI+Vault&expire=&urlID=34801184&fb=Y&url=http%3A%2F%2Fvault.sportsillustrated.cnn.com%2Fvault%2Farticle%2Fmagazine%2FMAG1153364%2F1%2Findex.htm&partnerID=289881
Bob Loblaw
May 4, 2009 at 11:58 pm
Don’t let school get in the way of your education. What Wildcat athletes learn here is how to suck it up and roll out of bed at 6:00 am to hit the practice field. How to discipline themselves to succeed during the class day at the same time as they prepare themselves to annihilate their opponents on game day. Academic success is not an automatic reflection of one’s ability to succeed – an A in Astrobiology is not an A in life. What athletes learn here, in addition to what they find in the classroom, is the motivation, discipline and heart to succeed in what they choose to do. These are lessons for life; traits which comprise all the “social capital” anyone will ever need.
Trey
May 5, 2009 at 12:01 am
Amen to that Trey. I am so proud to root for real student athletes here at NU. I could NEVER maintain their schedule.
Aaron Morse
May 5, 2009 at 12:04 am
An ignorant and baseless article. First of all, what is the reasoning behind the use of Edgerrin James as an example? Where is your source that verifies that he cannot form a coherent sentence? Anyone who follows the NFL knows Edge is actually an intelligent person, more so than most running backs in the NFL. Try doing some legitimate research before you make blanket, baseless statements to formulate your argument around. An ill-informed and illogically formulated article. Why sacrifice the scholarships of hard working student athletes for the mere improvement of athletic achievement? College sports should be about building and shaping the character of young men.
Max
May 5, 2009 at 12:52 am
If you want to write an article that actually makes sense, try arguing that if Northwestern wanted to REALLY stop limiting social mobility, they should just admit everyone regardless of GPA, and then just give scholarships to those who can’t afford the tuition. That would be ridiculous, but HEY — we’d have social mobility!!
S
May 5, 2009 at 1:07 am
I don’t know why people are acting so shocked about this concept, as if it didn’t happen at other schools every single year.
I guess you could say it’s because we’re “better” than them, but we’re not… in sports. Which is the point of this article.
Sam
May 5, 2009 at 5:26 pm
Sam, you’re wrong…we’re one of the top 40 schools in the country when it comes to sports.
http://grfx.cstv.com/photos/schools/nacda/sports/directorscup/auto_pdf/FinalD1.pdf
Those are last year’s final Director’s Cup standings. We aren’t ranked higher simply because we don’t have as many teams who can score points as say..Stanford.
So “the point of the article” as you put it, is wrong. We’re actually one of the best in the country when it comes to sports overall.
Aaron Morse
May 5, 2009 at 7:19 pm
I understand everyone’s opinions… on the surface it could seem like this article is saying that we should completely forsake our competetive academic standards and admit anyone who wants to go here. That’s not what this article is saying at at…
First of all, Trey… I’m not convinced that you know what “social capital” is… life lessons are great, but there’s only so much they can do to help you when you are working three jobs and still can’t afford to feed your family, much less send your kids to college. Cultural capitai is a similar story… when you go to a school whose culture is a little different from the dominant mainstream culture, but you’re expected to take standardize tests based on the cultural capital of the “dominant” culture, how can you be expected to succeed? Lowering our admissions standards for deserving students could be a good way to even the playing field… instead of making some arbitrary standard that some people are definitely more likely to reach just because of their race or socioeconomic situation…
And Max, the point of lowering admissions standards for athletes isn’t to improve our athletics. It’s to give people a chance at an illustrious education who wouldn’t be able to get it any other way. A lot of kids who could definitely succeed at a university of this academic level never get the chance because they lack the social and cultural capital. It’s unfair. Just like the author of this article says, sports are a place where we could give some of them a shot… but instead, our sports scholarships are given to kids who would’ve gotten in here and been able to pay anyway. All this does is reinforce socioeconomic reproduction. People who are very competent and intelligent are trapped in the same socioeconomic sphere that their parents were in because no one gave them a shot to break the cycle.
In order to stop this cycle, drastic steps have to be taken. Maybe that means that we let a few kids in here who didn’t get a 4.0 all four years, or a perfect SAT score, but who have demonstrated an incredible work ethic and are very talented athletes. It would be good if people here were a little more open-minded and actually committed to trying anything to break the cycle of poverty.
I don’t think that implementing this kind of policy would take anything away from our current and even future students or athletes. The kids who deserve to go here would still get in, and yeah, maybe our athletics would be a little more competetive… but is that the worst thing ever?
Northwestern could use a little diversity.
C
May 6, 2009 at 11:33 am
Aaron Morse, I checked your link. It rates schools according to men’s and women’s water polo, volleyball, track & field, tennis, softball, rowing, lacrosse, golf, and baseball. What important sport do you think is missing from this list? I’ll even give you two, two important sports?
FOOTBALL and BASKETBALL.
If you’re submitting rankings into consideration, they should be of the prominent sports. Not water polo.
Sam
May 6, 2009 at 4:50 pm
Wrong again Sam. Those rankings are indeed only showing the spring sports. Mainly because it’s an update at the end of the year and because of space consideration. Look to the right…it has fall total, winter total, and spring total, then the number on the left has the OVERALL TOTAL FROM ALL THREE SEASONS.
NU is number 40. One of the best in the country.
Aaron Morse
May 6, 2009 at 5:11 pm
Also, we don’t even have a water polo team :)
My point is, you take ALL our sports, INCLUDING football and basketball, and we are 40th best in the country.
Think how high our ranking will be this year…since football went 9-4 and basketball made the NIT.
Aaron Morse
May 6, 2009 at 5:19 pm
i’ve taken classes with some really retarded athletes.
the only one?
May 6, 2009 at 10:07 pm
In my humble salmony opinion, this was a really good article.
A Salmon Up Shit-Creek
May 6, 2009 at 10:25 pm
i no sum atheets our dumb!!???!! they rune the school because they ask dumb questions for are class
Just incredible...
May 7, 2009 at 1:43 pm
“Our university is so busy trying to uphold its academic standards that it doesn’t realize it’s limiting social mobility.”
Yes, academics are of higher priority to Northwestern that creating chances for people from the ‘lower class’ to attain a higher social status. Is this article seriously claiming it should be the other way around?
Also, it claims that athlete recruitment policies at other Universities are a way to circumvent the lack of social capital that is preventing Americans from realizing the American dream. However, sports scholarships are available to such an extremely small amount of the population that they don’t help anything.
But sports have been, and still are, a way to circumvent that problem at other universities.
Alex
May 8, 2009 at 1:53 am
Pushing athletes who aren’t capable of handling NU’s academics through the university with an undeserved degree (see Michigan Football – General Studies Major) will not help them be more socially mobile. It will throw them into the real world, unless they achieve enough success in pro sports to support themselves throughout their life, without anything close to an adequate education. This is simply using them to achieve sports success for the sake of the fans and the pockets of the University.
Do you think a coach could, in good faith, could look a recruit in the eye, promise him/her a scholarship to NU, knowing that he/she had a relatively small chance of earning a degree…
Mike
May 12, 2009 at 3:11 pm
Also, do you know what Bob Sanders’ SAT score was? Your use of him as an example makes no sense unless you have that sort of information. Maybe we recruited him. I doubt you know if we did or not. Also, so few varsity athletes strike it rich in the pros across the board at all schools. Maybe an example of an disadvantaged youth who, through earning an athletic scholarship, achieved success in the real world would be more effective.
Mike
May 12, 2009 at 3:16 pm