Throughout peoples childhood they are encouraged to be active, get involved and try their hardest. As they grow, they are told to focus on school, but spend most of our their time participating in extracurricular activities. How are kids supposed to put all their focus on academics if they have to spend all their time on athletics in hope of a scholarship? This is one of the reason kids do not always focus and perform like they should in class. Athletics is hurting the school system by taking away money from academics, giving athletes more privileges than nonathletic students, and it is effecting the outcome of students.
Sports are not terrible because they are very beneficial for everyone’s health, they help build skills and provides them with opportunities for a brighter future. Then again it is harmful towards school systems because the athletics department takes a portion of money they school have and put it into its teams. That’s not the best idea because as we have seen from the Western Carolina football team, the money put towards improving their performance is not helping. Do not get me wrong it helps some school sport teams improve, but if we focused more on education, then maybe we could improve our test scores throughout the United States. (Good point!)
Physical activity is needed, but education is necessary too since the US is falling behind in education compared to the rest of the world. As Steven Conn talks about in his article, “In College Classrooms, the Problem is High School Athletics”, he discusses how people have been trying to uncover how Finland has a great education system and he explains how they have no sport teams there. He also tells how people say it is not because of having no sports team and I agree t...
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Lewin, Tamar. "At Many Top Public Universities, Intercollegiate Sports Come at an Academic Price." The New York Times. The New York Times, 16 Jan. 2013. Web. 22 Apr. 2014.
This article tells how colleges that compete in the NCAA spend three to six times as much on their athletics than they do on academics. Athletics are being chosen over academics even in the recession when money was tight, they still invested in athletic programs. Some presidents over colleges want to cut back the spending on athletics, but they cannot make that suggestion without fear of losing their job. It is said that the money goes to the overall campus and athletics, but it mainly goes to athletics. The athletic programs need more because the football teams consume most of it and it was discovered that 7.6 percent of student fees cover the athletic budget.
Over the course of time, schools have invested all their finances on sports like football. Primarily, the sport had initiated as a form of recreational fun, but therefore lead into a trend. This popular trend later spread into competitiveness and in some schools, even idolized. At Premont High School, a small school in Texas, it was threatening to be shut down for the neglection of academics and a misuse of finance. All money funded was focused on being used to support all sports and the money raised, was a large amount of money. The solution was to suspend all sports and with that, changes were made. Teachers were retrained, the curriculum was raised to the appropriate standard, and too much avail, academics improved significantly. According to the article, when sports have been dominating, only 50 percent of the students were passing their classes. After changes were made, 80 percent were now passing. The author argues that with the suspension of sports, academics would be at a higher level than they are. With this argument, I agree with Ripley’s motion to cancel all sports. To many students, such as myself, it may seem irrational and absurd at first, but realistically it is a reasonable solution. Tons of money is being spent primarily to a sport and most times, aren't even at a winning season. Sports should not the prime focus. Schools are not instituted to emphasis on sports
Some feel that by not paying college athletes that college institutions are thereby exploiting their athletes free of charge, which is unfair. However, this article feels that college athletes are paid very favorably by the large amount of money they receive for schooling through scholarships. Also, since college athletes don’t pay to play or go to school they are receiving a free college degree whether or not they decide to stay in school for four years or not. With the training that they receive from professional trainers and nutritionists for a professional controlled diet they save possibly thousands within the 4 years they attend school and perform in collegiate athletics.
College athletes attend post-secondary schools in order to receive an education and to participate in sports. “Student athletes participate in an organized competitive sport sponsored by the educational institution in which he or she is enrolled. Student athletes must typically balance the roles of being a full-time student and a full-time athlete” (“Student athlete” 1). Additionally, some people believe athletes should receive a salary. However, paying college athletes hurts the school, the sports, and the athletes.
Sports are a crucial part of an individual 's character. Counter arguments made against having sports at schools are getting more and more public. The arguments make people, think again about having students play sports. Sports are useful because they give players skills they can use on and off the field: strength, leadership, and confidence.
Amanda Ripley argues in The Atlantic in her article “The Case Against High School Sports”, that the United States place too much attention on sports rather than academics. Ripley argues that sports programs at schools should be reduced, maybe even cut out completely. She states that there are a lot of countries that outperform America on international tests, and it is because they put more of their emphasis on academics, where the United States puts more of an emphasis on athletics. Ripley says that high school sports negatively affects academics. (1). I disagree with Ripley on this topic; I think that sports are important for young kids because it teaches them very valuable life lessons and it keeps them out of trouble.
Luzer, Daniel. "College Guide: The Profit in College Sports." The Washington Monthly. N.p., 18 Sept. 2013. Web. 8 Apr. 2014.
Student athletes should not be paid more than any other student at State University, because it implies that the focus of this university is that an extracurricular activity as a means of profit. Intercollegiate athletics is becoming the central focus of colleges and universities, the strife and the substantial sum of money are the most important factors of most university administration’s interest. Student athletes should be just as their title states, students. The normal college student is struggling to make ends meet just for attending college, so why should student athletes be exempt from that? College athletes should indeed have their scholarships cover what their talents not only athletically but also academically depict. Unfortunately, the disapproval resides when students who are making leaps academically are not being offered monetary congratulations in comparison to student athletes. If the hefty amount of revenue that colleges as a conglomerate are making is the main argument for why athletes should be paid, then what is to stop the National Clearinghouse from devising unjust standards? Eventually if these payments are to continue, coaches, organizations, and the NCAA Clearinghouse will begin to feel that “c...
After reading " The Case Against High School Sports" by Amanda Ripley started to make me think. There were many strong points about how the priorities of the sports are beginning to be more important to students than their education. Another great point was that the financing and budgeting is unfairly distributed throughout school districts and is spent more on athletics and clubs and not enough on classes. And I Believe that schools should put certain restrictions on the spending and promoting or in school sports and clubs because of the major drop in national and world comparisons.
College athletes are undoubtedly some of the hardest working people in the world. Not only are they living the life of an average student, they also have a strenuous schedule with their specific sport. One of the most discussed topics in the world of college athletics is whether or not student-athletes should be paid money for playing sports. The people who disagree with the idea have some good arguments to make. Primarily that the athletes get to go to school for free for playing sports. Another argument is that if student-athletes were to get paid then it would ruin the amateurism of college sports. People who are against paying the athletes do not want to see the young people become focused on money. “Paying student-athletes would dramatically shift their focus away from where it should be - gaining knowledge and skills for life after college” (Lewis and Williams). This is very understandable because one of the biggest reasons college sports are so popular is because the athletes play for school pride and for bragging rights. They play because they enjoy the game, not because it is their job. Most people that disagree with the idea of paying the athletes fail to realize what really goes on behind the scenes. At most Universities around the country the bulk of the income the school receives is brought in through the athletic programs. In fact the football and basketball teams usually bring in enough money to completely pay for the rest of the athletic programs all together. To get a better understanding of how much has changed in the world of college sports a little history must be learned.
The payment of NCAA student-athletes will deteriorate the value of an education to the athletes. The value of an education for a young man or woman cannot be measured. It is our gate way to success as...
Financial aspects and profitability of college athletic programs is one of the most important arguments involved in this controversy. A group of people expresses that college athletic programs are over emphasized. The point they show on the first hand, is that athletic programs are too expensive for community colleges and small universities. Besides, statistics prove that financial aspects of college athletic programs are extremely questionable. It is true that maintenance, and facility costs for athletic programs are significantly high in comparison to academic programs. Therefore, Denhart, Villwock, and Vedder argue that athletic programs drag money away from important academics programs and degrade their quality. According to them, median expenditures per athlete in Football Bowl Subdivision were $65,800 in 2006. And it has shown a 15.6 percent median expenditure increase fro...
Paying college athletes is a bad idea because of the cost associated with it. According to equal rights policies and other rules by the NCAA, colleges are required to pay all athletes, regardless of gender, sport played, publicity for the college from the sport, or proficiency in the sport. This means that colleges like the University of Tennessee, which has over 500 student athletes, would have to devote a large portion of their athletics budget to paying student athletes. According to Jim Walker, these massive costs may cause colleges to close less profitable activities like tennis or golf in an effort to save money for the big, money-making sports such as football and basketball (1). Women’s sports would likewise be targeted, as they usually operate at a higher cost than they bring in revenue (Walker 1). For colleges operating with lower budgets, having sports programs may become completely impossible. As sports editor Al Dunning said “Where are athletes going to play- and receive scholarships- when all but the richest schools go broke?” (1).
Colleges demand a well-rounded resume that students are trying to fulfill so they can get accepted to the college or university they desire most. “We know schools and families are embedded in society and are responding to its changing requirements and demands, with respect to the competitiveness to the college admissions process, the kinds of skills needed to succeed in the workforce, and even uncertainties in the global economy” (NYU Study Examines), in a study, students from a big university admit to finding that students are becoming more stressed out because of college pressures while still in high school. Colleges are trying to find the students that can succeed in both academics and extracurricular activities. Once students get into college, student athletes can buy a book written by Carl I. Fertman appropriately titled Student Athlete Success – Meeting the Challenges of College Life, to help organize their priorities with their busy schedule. This is a work book that allows the college athletes relate to other college athletes that feel the same way they do. College has its own set of challenges that high school students usually do not face, so this book would help the students cope with these new challenges. In the first section, there is a heading that is labeled “What Student-Athletes Say” with a list of common quotes from student athletes themselves. For example “Sometimes I feel like student athletes have extra pressure and greater expectations placed on them than other students. Everyone knows who we are and people are looking at us to catch us doing something wrong”. (2), which shows how students that do participate in sports feel as though they have added pressure because they are so well known in most cases. Although they do commit to being more known than a regular student when they join a sports team, it is often not fair to the
For decades there has been a debate on student athletes and their drive to succeed in the classroom. From the very beginning of organized college level athletics, the goal to want to succeed in athletics has forced students to put academics to the back burner. In spite of the goal to want to succeed over a hundred years of attempts to check limits of intercollegiate athletic programs on colleges' academic standards still seems to struggle to this day. This brings to surface one of the most asked questions in sports, “What effect does college sports have on academics and economics?” Herbert D. Simons, Derek Van Rheenen, and Martin V. Covington, authors of “Academic Motivation and the Student Athlete” researched the topic on whether athletics and academics benefit each other. Bryan Flynn, the author of “College Sports vs. Academics” poses the question “Should institutions of higher learning continue to involve themselves in athletic programs that often turn out to be virtual arms races for recruiting talented players who bring big money and prestige, but put academics to the back burner?” Although both authors agree that sports have an impact on an athlete’s academics, the focus of their argument differs.
So, considering that high school sports do give kids an opportunity to expand socially, keep them in shape, and healthy, an opportunity to make many friends, and a shot at getting a scholarship, and making it to the professional level in their sport. But long term, the negative effects are more in the sense it could damage a student permanently, from an academic level to a physiological level. Also, most of the positive things people would argue aren’t guaranteed to happen or isolate them from the negative effects. But when it comes to the negative side, a student would need to go through some of the stages, maybe not all, but for sure some. To sum it all up, high school sports are more negative on a student than positive, even though people tend to see only the positive things that can come from them.