collegiate athletics --- a paradox?

There's a few things I really enjoy talking about. Sports, music, and accounting. (I know, pretty boring, right?)

Collegiate sports is such a great topic because the intensity with which the players compete, and the pride that they ooze out on the court, field, track, and ice is amazing. As with everything, there is good and bad and with collegiate sports comes the controversy of the "student-athlete".

The NCAA touts that its student-athletes are students first but schools constantly contradict that by allowing the athletes (which help contribute millions of dollars to their respective universities) to take (meaningless) majors with low eventual profitability and/or low difficulty. For example, this article I read today, claims that big-time schools' Athletic Departments ask teachers to basically 'take it easy' on the athletes in their class. By doing this, schools are telling their athletes: "We couldn't care less about your academic composition and development and after you graduate, we don't care what happens to you. But thanks for putting kids in the stands for us." NCAA, why say you hold them to the same standards as other students if you know that you really don't?

So here's the paradoxical issue: if the NCAA wants them to be students first---make them students. Put them in classrooms (and monitor their attendance) and challenge them! Help them succeed and hold them truly accountable. BUT! There's another obvious side to this. There are some collegiate athletes who don't really plan on using the college tools and really just want to use the college level as a springboard to the big league, which is perfectly fine. And if this is the case---the NCAA NEEDS TO ADMIT THEY ARE NOT FULL-TIME STUDENTS. Allow them to take "phony" classes, skip as many as they'd like, and treat their sport as their full time employment.

The NCAA cant have it both ways. You can't treat a student like a superstar athlete with little classroom obligation and then portend to say 'education comes first.' The only thing that matters to the NCAA are the dollar signs.