THE DESCHOOLING OF COLLEGE BASKETBALL

THE DESCHOLING OF COLLEGE BASKETBALL

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 17, 2010

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“Our society resembles the ultimate machine which I once saw in a New York shop. It was a metal casket which, when you touched a switch, snapped open to reveal a mechanical hand. Chromed fingers reached out for the lid, pulled it down and locked it from the inside. It was a box; you expected to be able to take something out of it, yet all it contained was a mechanism for closing the cover. This contraption is the opposite of Pandora’s box.”

Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (Harper & Row 1970), p.151.

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“For the first time in the history of our country, the educational skills of one generation will not surpass, will not equal, will not even approach, those of their parents.”

John Copperman, “Inside American Education” by Thomas Sowell (The Free Press 1993)

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BRACKET THIS -- THE MYTH OF THE STUDENT ATHLETE IN COLLEGE BASKETBALL!


Economic watchers estimate that several $Billion is lost in productivity during the “March Madness” of the NCAA College Basketball Tournament. The top 64 teams in the country compete for the national championship.

People will be watching the game on some electronic contraption, twitting or texting, or skipping work altogether to attend some games, not to mention betting on the games at work, or standing around talking about their favorite team.

Damaging as all this may be, and I’m not minimizing it, the greater travesty is to consider the fact that these college players are athletes’ first and college scholars second, or not at all. There are exceptions but I'm speaking of the rule.

Dedicated college basketball players are essentially in the minors, or the Grapefruit League of Professional Basketball. Their drive to get to the big dance is mainly to profile their talents for the NBA. That is where the travesty lies.

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Observers of education such as Page Smith (“Killing the Spirit” Penguin Books 1990) have been decrying the lame dogmatic and counterproductive travesty that is college education with Smith referring to it as “mapping out the desert.”

That said if you like sport, and I happen to have played and liked basketball, being four years on the varsity in high school, education was always my primary motivation with basketball a recreational alternative. Also, in my day, if you weren’t a reasonable student, you couldn’t even practice much less play in games.

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At university, I was president of my dormitory where all “student-athletes” on scholarship resided. Many of them were already entering the university with only a vague notion of schoolwork much less scholarship. Some could not even read well enough to have completed a rigorous high school program.

In one instance, a basketball player who would one day play in the NCAA Championship Game asked me to take a final for him. I was the wrong color and also had never taken the course. Putting aside the ethics of the situation, and to put him down gently, I said, “I don’t know anything about this course. I’ve never studied this material.”

“That may be true,” he said, “but you’d do better than I would because I haven’t had much of a chance to study the material at all.”

Now, that may or may not be true, but I knew how hard these athletes worked in their jobs to make the basketball team. It was a full-time job. Moreover, he wasn’t stupid. In fact, he was quite a bright guy but sport was his whole curriculum and his coaches and the athletic director supported this.

This was in the “Big Ten” conference, which was alleged to uphold high academic standards. As you will see below, that is not always true.

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Fast-forward 50 years and what follows is the graduation rate of members of the “Final 64 College Team” in 2010:

Graduation rates of 100 percent

1. Marquette (100)
2. Utah State (100)
3. Notre Dame (100)
4. BYU (100)
5. Wake Forest (100)

Graduation rates in the 90 percent range

6. Lehigh (92)
7. Vermont (92)
8. Butler (90)
9. Duke (92)
10. Villanova (92)

Graduation rates in the 80 percent range

11. Georgetown (82)
12. Ohio (85)
13. Oklahoma St. (82)
14. UCSB (82)
15. Florida St. (80)
16. Vanderbilt (85)
17. Xavier (89)
18. Oakland (82)
19. Sienna (86)
20. Richmond (85)

Graduation rates in the 70 percent range

21.Kansas (73)
22. N. Iowa (78)
23. Murray St. (73)
24. Pittsburgh (75)
25. Winthrop (75)
26. Wisconsin (78)
27. Gonzaga (78)
28. UTEP (71)

Graduation rates in the 60 percent range

29. Ohio St. (60)
30. Florida (60)
31. Kansas St. (62)
32. N. Texas (60)
33. Purdue (64)
34. Montana (67)
35. R. Morris (67)
36. E. Tenn. St. (61)

Graduation rates in the 50 percent range

37. Michigan St. (58)
38. San Diego St. (58)
39. Syracuse (55)
40. Texas A&M (56)
41. Old Dominion (53)
42. St. Mary’s (57)
43, Sam Houston (50)

Graduation rates in the 40 percent range

44. UNLV (46)
45. Houston (42)
46. Minnesota (44)
47. Texas (47)
48. Temple (43)
49. New Mexico (43)
50. W. Virginia (44)
51. Morgan St. (42)

Graduation rates in the 30 percent range

52. Tennessee (30)
53. Ga. Tech (38)
54. Clemson (37)
55. Missouri (36)
56. Louisville (38)
57. Baylor (36)
58. N. Mexico St. (36)
59. Kentucky (31)

Graduation rates in the 20 percent range

60. Arkansas P. B. (29)
61. Washington (29)
62. California (20)

Graduation rates below 10 percent range

63. Maryland (8)

64.Cornell (Ivy League Schools do not report graduation rates)

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I wrote in WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990), “The Japanese seem obsessed with people and realize profits. Americans seem obsessed with profits, but realize problems with people. The irony is the Japanese understand and play the business game far better than Americans who invented it.” (p. 138)

Alfred Sloan, the legendary leader of General Motors, once boasted that GM, although forced to lay off tens of thousands of workers during the Great Depression, continued to pay stockholders dividends. Ultimately, as we know in 2010, GM has collapsed and is suffering for its hubris and insensitivity to people.

Toyota followed the American model while still focusing on people to realize profits until it got caught up in the same American economic “win,” translated be “Numero Uno.”

College athletics, mainly football and basketball, are big business. Colleges build quarter billion stadiums and have 100,000 fans attending college football games. College basketball arenas have likewise growing in size to seat tens of thousands of fans.

College sports no longer recruit scholar athletes like some that I know from my generation, students first and foremost and athletes after the fact. That is no longer true as the breakdown of graduation rates indicate here. My words aren’t going to change anything, that is, unless and until presidents of universities are no longer general managers of professional programs being touted as amateurs.

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We have seen the Olympics become a mockery of amateur athletics. The International Olympic Governing Committee has finally conceded amateurism was a travesty of the facts allowing professional athletes to compete.

These sports programs in colleges and universities are not doing the athletes any favor by not insisting on them being students first and athletes second. Why? Because less than 10 percent of them will ever make a living as athletes, but they all can make a living with the skills, knowledge and understanding of a college education that ends in a degree.

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