Often it’s essentially an on-paper degree in soft majors specifically designed to cater to athlete schedules and ensure minimal attendance or effort is needed to pass and stay eligible for sports.
For the majority of D-1 student athletes, unless they go pro (a tiny percentage) or otherwise convert their college fame into a career, the degree does not open any doors. There are exceptions, but it’s rare.
Even athletes who do make it pro are often fucked over by the teams they play for, agents, financial advisors, etc., and a lot of them still end up poor, especially if they are more of a roster player who only manage to stay in the league for a few seasons.
For example, I’d guess a lot of people reading this article earn more than median salary for Major League Soccer. In 2016 the median was around $117,000 per year, with around 40 players (on senior rosters) earning the league minimum of about $55,000 [1].
Professional sports leagues are pretty brutal places for all but the biggest stars and of course managers and executives (unsurprisingly disproportionately white men as well...).
Just having a BA in anything is going to open more job opportunities than not having one. Even just having an Associates is going to open more than just a highschool diploma. A lot of athletes get degrees in things like biology and communications, not exceptionally hard majors but they still have that piece of paper if they graduate. Unless you want to work minimum wage or ruin your body working manual labor, a degree in anything is required.
Could these kids have gone further in life going to a trade school? Could they have joined the military and went to college for a competitive degree under the GI Bill? Maybe, but at the time, a scholarship to play football at a university was a lot of kids only opportunity.
It's honestly very difficult for me to understand this mentality. Is a degree supposed to represent a certain level of education, or is it just an arbitrary way of sorting people into different social classes?
There was another article on HN about how a masters' degree in physics increases earnings and is a great career move. Should we find a few thousand kids who are outliers in some bodily attribute every year, and arbitrarily give them physics masters' degrees? Wouldn't there be some serious drawbacks to this? How is this different from giving BAs with basically zero academic requirements to people because of their football skill?
The system in the US is just so bizarre. In every single other country in the world[1], universities are one thing, and elite amateur or semi-pro sports leagues are another thing, and nobody would really imagine mixing them.
[1]: This is literally true, as far as I know, but please correct me if I'm wrong. I actually get pretty annoyed when people talk about how the US is the "only country in the world" with various problems like violence or healthcare, because usually by "the world" they mean "highly developed Western and Northern Europe". But in this case I think there are actually literally zero other examples of countries with the dysfunctional fusion of academia and semi-pro sports that exists in the US.
Unfortunately, the US poor and middle class cannot usually attend higher-education unless given a massive scholarship through some sort of application process (which they might not even get) or take out large loans that take decades to pay back in most cases. Athletic programs offer help to the few that perform at the peak of their sport. It's not a great system, it's a lottery for student athletes who can't afford college. I don't think university athletics programs are the worst thing, it should be separate but it's not the major problem. The major issue is the requirement of a college degree for anything and the lack of major public funding. Sure, you can get grants from the govt that help cover school but very few people can attend school with zero expenses. I think that part needs to change. I think free college (and discounted university tuition) would greatly improve things. It would also have an affect of university athletics program where they wouldn't be able to dangle such massive opportunities in poor people's faces to attract them to their school. If kids are less focused on getting the athletic scholarship, they would be able to focus on school more.
>Even athletes who do make it pro are often fucked over by the teams they play for, agents, financial advisors, etc., and a lot of them still end up poor, especially if they are more of a roster player who only manage to stay in the league for a few seasons.
Yes, but that is supposing they would not end up the same way had they not played. Also there are lots of people would love to earn 55K to play soccer.
Lots of people actually pay for the privilege to play normal people in their same city...
> "Yes, but that is supposing they would not end up the same way had they not played."
That's supposing they would wind up with brain damage if they had not played. For most it seems likely to be a net loss, but try explaining that to a teenager who only wants to consider the moonshot of making it big.
