Athletes as Students: Major Problems

It's the middle of summer break, which means student athletes are preparing for the upcoming season with 12 hours of grueling math drills a day.

Actually, they spend their summers training on the field, preparing to do the serious academic work of catching a football. This seems removed from the mission of the University, which consists of providing a top-tier education to Illinoisans whose parents gave money to Rod Blagojevich.

Regular students have nothing in common with college jocks, starting with the way the groups get into college. Recruiters travel the country, attending high school football games to determine, based on a teenager's ability to throw a football 60 yards, whether he'll be good at macroeconomics.

Colleges don't go to this trouble for anyone else. My high school sends about 100 kids a year to the University of Illinois, but no washed-up jock ever came to AP Calculus to time how quickly I took a derivative.

It gets worse after students get to college. Athletes get different areas of study than the rest of us. You can tell if a major is for jocks based on whether the words in its name go together.

Take "English Literature." This is a perfectly sensible phrase. Lots of literature was written in English – the Mario Kart instruction manual, for example.

But athletes wind up with majors whose titles make no sense, such as "Leisure Studies." This is to protect the university.

An English Lit major works hard to master her chosen field, so she can confidently answer questions like "Who wrote 'The Great Gatsby'?" or "Do you have Shamrock Shakes?"

If an athlete were asked an academic question like that, the answer could only embarrass his college. But what kind of question would trip up a basketball player in leisure studies? "Which type of swing set is best?"

Yet jocks always carry their schools' banners in televised sporting events. "Florida State has defeated Yale," an announcer will say, as if the Seminoles were about to start churning out U.S. Presidents.

What we can't do is, we can't just rush out and terminate intercollegiate athletics. Most schools need their sports programs. If a college doesn't recruit good athletes, its teams won't do well enough to bring in enough alumni money to recruit even better athletes in the future.

So we need to work within the existing system. One possibility is holding athletes to the same standards as other students. This is a terrible idea. Top athletes would only be able to attend colleges where they could compete academically, and national championships would go to joke schools like Northwest Wyoming Tech and Indiana University.

No, the only way to take care of this problem is to hold other students to the same academic standards as athletes, what with their excessive tutoring and three-hour A's in "Hats of Many Cultures."

The other aspects of being a student athlete – the hours and hours of excruciating practices, the getting booed by tens of thousands of fans, the fending off ad hominem attacks from college newspaper columns – those they can keep. I don't have time for all that. This Mario Kart instruction manual is too engaging.

Scott is a 2009 graduate of the College of Law.