
U.N.C. Investigation Reveals ‘Shadow Curriculum’ to Help Athletes - rgovind
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/23/sports/university-of-north-carolina-investigation-reveals-shadow-curriculum-to-help-athletes.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&bicmp=AD&bicmlukp=WT.mc_id&bicmst=1409232722000&bicmet=1419773522000
======
sillysaurus3
Why is every semi-pro athlete expected to get a decent GPA in order to play on
a university's football team? It's a completely different skillset. I don't
blame players for ditching classes to pursue their dreams. Quite the opposite,
in fact. It's the same drive as an entrepreneur's: to test yourself, to excel.
It's just a different context.

They are adults. If, as adults, they choose not to pursue academic studies,
and instead choose to focus all of their energy on sports, then they should be
allowed to do that without putting their sports career at risk.

I do blame everyone involved in the fakeness, though. Their decisions should
stand on their own.

~~~
rrrx3
The problem is that they're being exploited. Choose to go to class or not,
they are not being paid anything remotely close to the value that these
schools get from them in terms of team gear sales, ad revenue, tv time,
increased enrollment, etc etc etc.

This is especially true when they're turning in BS papers for crap degrees
that can't and won't serve them once they leave school. A minuscule few make
it pro. The rest - if they graduate, even - have only an AFAM degree to show
for it and no real life skills.

I agree that if they want to be athletes, they should be allowed to be
athletes. But they should be paid appropriately for it in kind.

~~~
mbreese
Well, they are getting compensation in terms of free tuition, room and board,
etc... these things do have significant value. If they complete school, they
get to walk away with a degree without any debt. That's not trivial.

 _However_ , the athletes are only able to actualize this compensation if they
can freely choose their majors, are able to take the classes they want, and
actually earn their education. By creating a secondary tier of classes, the
school was deliberately exploiting them.

I think that the value of a degree (for an athlete) will vary greatly
depending on the school. Some schools are more academically rigorous for
athletes than others... UNC apparently was on the low end of the scale.

~~~
rodgerd
> Well, they are getting compensation in terms of free tuition, room and
> board, etc... these things do have significant value.

Compare and contrast with the money an 18-21 year old second team player at
Real Madrid or Barcelona makes and get back to me on the "significant value".
Especially when the athletes are being funneled through second-rate degrees to
free up their time for sport.

~~~
cafard
A fairer comparison might be to the pay received in US minor league baseball.
These can go as high as $90 thousand. But you can also play at the highest
level of minor league ball, AAA, and get $2150 per month.

Having said that, I agree with you on the whole. They are being paid in kind:
in room and board that they could get at home, and in tuition that doesn't
seem to amount to much. I think that baseball's structure of minor leagues and
Canadian hockey's junior hockey offer a better deal to the young athlete.

------
IvyMike
MLB has the minor leagues as their feeder program.

The NFL has college football as their feeder program.

There are a lot of tradeoffs, but in the end I think the MLB's system is
better. To me, the charade of "student athletes" in football gets more and
more strained each year.

The question is if they did want to transition to a minor league football
system, how can you go from here to there in an orderly fashion?

~~~
cpwright
It seems like you could assign each existing NFL franchise the right to have a
minor league franchise (maybe let them bid or have a lottery for the rights to
specific cities); and then draft out of high-school and college rather than
just out of college.

The player's union would clearly have something to say about it, particularly
if they can easily bring players up and down mid-season based on injuries or
performance.

~~~
remarkEon
Maybe. But you'd have to convince the NFL that a minor league is something
worth investing in. A longer pipeline of higher volume of play means that the
risk of injury would be substantially higher. The NFL seems more interesting
in making money that dealing with anything more complex than moving a team to
London.

------
zaidf
I graduated from UNC's Communication Studies program, one that many athletes
sign up for. I took classes with many of the athletes, including half of our
championship basketball team. I can honestly say I did not find any organized
attempts on part of the professors to provide underhanded help to athletes. So
if it happened, it was by administrators, away from the sight of the rest of
students/instructors.

Even then, I am a bit surprised. I remember athlete friends being super
concerned about their attendance and passing. In almost every class, we'd get
someone drop by while class was in session to check if the athletes in the
class were in actually there.

------
ericboggs
UNC grad here. These "paper" classes were _very_ well known when I was an
undergrad.

Your university almost certainly had similar classes that were very easy and
required very little attendance...and were always full of athletes and lazy
seniors looking to pump up their GPA.

You can't fault the students (athletes or otherwise) for finding a shortcut in
the system and then exploiting it. It is the university's responsibility to
quality control its curriculum.

~~~
eitally
Agree 100%. And -- even if they took "real" classes, all the high profile
athletes have private tutors, too, who may well do a large portion of their
work for them.

------
nkozyra
With regard to college athletes ...

I think they should be on a college team.

I think they should be going to college.

I do not think they should be paid.

Like most people, they are preparing for their future in the field of their
interest.

The issue, in my opinion, is that we attempt to shoehorn them into
"traditional" curriculum. They're forced to choose a major, often funneled
into the easiest thing just to get through.

Fundamentally, the majority are in college to learn and prepare for life as a
professional athlete (assuming we're talking about the "Big 3" sports). Let's
allow them to do that. Let's provide programs that focus on that, that teach
sport fundamentals, dealing with the media, managing money, dealing with
agents, fundamentals of business, etc. Let's also provide routes for post-
professional-sport life, like lower-level media classes, etc.

We seem to have an aversion to treating a lucrative and very real profession
like something that warrants education.

Edit: The problem with $ and athletes largely applies solely to football,
wherein the NCAA and NFL have colluded to force high school talent to play
_somewhere_ for three years after graduation. This is arbitrary and stupid,
and forces kids into programs they don't care about, for institutions that
they don't care about. This is the primary issue with not paying players. It's
not that colleges don't pay, it's that there's _no other opportunity_ to get
paid.

~~~
crassus2
Problem is, only 1.7% of college football players are ever going to play
professional ball.

~~~
nkozyra
I think the % is higher, even if we're talking about practice squads.

As mentioned, the curriculum would also include tangentially related fields.

------
cellis
Sometimes I wonder why these requirements are there in the first place. Why
not just be honest about it, pay the athletes and get on with the sports
program. It's not like 80% of the degrees at most universities are worth
anything anyways.

------
tzs
The NCAA is basically a joke when it comes to enforcing their rules on
academic standards. This was made clear a couple years ago, when they hit
Caltech with big penalties for lax academic standards, while basically
ignoring things like the UNC scandal.

Caltech was fact was technically in violation, because it allows students to
spend the first three weeks of each term taking classes without registering
for them. The idea is that students can sample several classes they are
interested in, then decide which they will stick with, and then register. For
this three weeks, they are doing the work from all of the classes they are
sampling.

However, since they are not registered for a full academic load during that
three weeks, they count as part-time students, not full-time students, and so
are ineligible for NCAA sports. Caltech's new director of athletics noticed
this, stopped the violations, and reported his department to the NCAA.

The reaction of the press, both general and sports (Google "NCAA caltech" for
details), was generally to make fun of the NCAA, and point out all the serious
athletic schools routinely committing much worse, much more intentional
violations.

Of course, some of the major sanctions won't have any effect. For instance,
Caltech was banned from postseason play for one year. Considering that most
Caltech teams are in the midst of years or even decades long losing streaks in
conference play, they aren't going near the postseason anyway. They also
banned off-campus recruiting...which Caltech doesn't do.

The only sanction that might have actually been noticeable was wiping out all
wins of the ineligible teams. There was some initial concern that this would
wipe out the basketball win over Occidental earlier that year that had snapped
a 26 year, 310 conference game losing streak [1]. It turned out all the
players on that team had been eligible, so the win stands.

[1] A movie was made about this:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Hoops](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Hoops)

~~~
qq66
"Lax academic standards" at Caltech... now I've seen everything.

------
Alex3917
I'd highly recommend the documentary Schooled: The Price of College Sports. It
shows many interviews with the students, coaches, and staff involved with this
situation. (Also free w/ Amazon Prime.)

------
csdrane
Pretty shocking but I imagine this is just the tip of the iceberg.

~~~
w1ntermute
It's probably happening at a lot of other universities with big sports
programs. UNC just happened to get caught.

~~~
evanriley
Oh, its probably happening at most universities. I went to N.C. State and
would be surprised if it WASN'T happening there too. I assume any school which
gets a amount of money from their sports program would have something similar
to UNC.

~~~
javert
The amazing thing at UNC is that it was just a rogue low-level employee (who
picked up a couple of minor co-conspirators on the way), NOT a coordinated
effort from the top of the university down.

I would imagine at many or most big sports schools, it is the latter.

Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if it's the latter at UNC too. If so, UNC
has done a world-class cover up so far by making it look like the former.

~~~
belovedeagle
World-class? It may look that way from the outside to people unfamiliar with
the university, but from the inside, this cover-up is ridiculously
transparent. It's clear that most of the AFAM department knew what was going
on, as well as the tutors and students.

~~~
javert
I think you misunderstood my point. If it is "clear" that most of the AFAM
department knew, the scandal has successfully been pinned on and contained to
the AFAM department, and has _not_ contaminated the highest levels of the
university (i.e. Chancellor, Provost, athletics chairman, etc.).

------
redraga
European football (soccer) teams run academies of their own to groom players.
If a youngster is serious about becoming a professional footballer, he/she
joins these academies. They are given a "well-rounded" education, but the
emphasis is obviously on the sport. Graduates end being signed by the parent
club, or getting contracts with lower-level teams if they can make the cut.

I'm curious to understand why this system isn't practiced in the US.

~~~
iends
I wasn't a particularly great soccer player in middle school and highschool
(some players on the club team ended up playing D3 soccer at small colleges),
but the academies really didn't exist in America 20 years ago when I started
playing as a kid.

Things are much different now many of the clubs in MLS, NASL, and USL have
their own academies where the players are coached by professional coaches or
pro players at starting very young ages. One local example is:
[http://www.capitalarearailhawks.com/](http://www.capitalarearailhawks.com/)

The model is much different, though. Generally the goal with most of these
academies is to make a college team.

------
Chevalier
Honestly, doesn't this make anyone wonder what the point is of college in the
first place? Even without the equivalent of special ed courses, it's not like
most (any?) athletes study STEM courses that might require university
certification. Literally the only point of their enrollment is to make money
for the school, then shuffle off with a communications degree and work in a
shoe store the rest of their lives.

Yes, they can get drunk and get laid for a couple years, and if they're really
good they might not have to borrow too much money for the privilege. But what
a complete waste of time for everyone involved. They take pointless courses
for worthless degrees so the student body can burn cars when balls are thrown
correctly.

Europeans have the right approach to education, even if they're still too
credential-obsessed. Nobody cares about college sports, nobody goes into debt
pursuing their degrees, and everyone can enter the work force much younger and
start earning a few extra years of salary.

~~~
eitally
I mostly disagree with your premise. This is a problem that only really
afflicts two college sports: football & basketball, which are not
coincidentally the only revenue sports at most schools. Most student-athletes
take academics as seriously as their sport(s), and I think the fact that
American colleges & universities offer top quality athletic programs as well
as academic educations one of the best things about them.

That said, football & basketball are completely out of hand, not to mention
the playoff/BCS/NCAA Tournament system, TV/media rights, and the insanity of
one-and-done feeder systems into the NBA (I'm looking at you, Kentucky!).
Those athletes should be paid and they should potentially be employed by the
colleges as athletes completely separately from any academic matriculation.

~~~
Chevalier
Well, I agree with you that the rowing/badminton/chess teams probably don't
get special treatment. But you don't seem to question the value of "top
quality athletic programs." Why do we want them to exist in the first place?

The ostensible point of university is to develop a student's mind to solve
problems -- preferably in the real world, though humanities programs insist
that paying $50k+/year to read poetry is just as valuable an investment. Even
if you take that assertion at face value, I'm not sure anyone, anywhere
pretends that playing basketball prepares the student-athlete for anything at
all. Almost none of them have a chance at a professional sports contract. Most
will graduate with useless majors, having squandered their youth and their
health on pointless competitions to throw a ball in a hoop. It's STUPID.
Everyone involved is wasting their time.

I'm all for athletics in colleges. I played intramural sports and enjoyed it,
because nobody pretended that it mattered. But I really don't see a compelling
case for the subsidy of organized college sports... which, like someone
pointed out, is really just a a subsidy for professional organizations.

And it's not just the pointless waste of time and money in college sports. The
argument for college as an institution is getting weaker and weaker as free
online alternatives get better and better. Aside from getting drunk and
cheering against UMichigan, what compelling features does Ohio State
University offer versus Harvard's courses on edX?

~~~
kofejnik
Very few people would be happy studying lambda calculus in their basement,
most humans like being around other humans. Socialization is why colleges
matter, not useless humanities degrees.

~~~
Chevalier
And that's why, in functional countries, socialization is a natural
consequence of urban design. You don't need a horrifically expensive excuse to
drive to some random location to meet people -- you bump into them naturally
as pedestrians and cyclists. University towns are the closest the US gets to
Copenhagen, due to absurd subsidies of automobile traffic.

But I agree with you about lambda calculus. Let's definitely keep higher
education for STEM fields, where rigorous and difficult subjects would benefit
from such educations. At the same time, let's be real. Most university
students today are wasting their time getting worthless degrees, for no reason
but that credential inflation has turned BAs/BSs into high school diplomas.

