I’m still waiting for my copy to arrive, but Saturday’s Wall Street Journal has a review of Cheated, Jay Smith and Mary Willingham’s account of the big scandal at the University of North Carolina, by Gregg Easterbrook (an Atlantic editor).
The book is very hard on UNC’s administration, which ignored evidence that many athletes in the big money sports (football and men’s basketball) were able to keep their eligibility to play because they were channeled into soft courses (sometimes courses in name only) where they received high grades. Easterbrook writes, “UNC officials did not want to know how athletes who had barely bested chance on their SATs were suddenly pulling A’s at a selective college. Cheated recounts two instances when staffers told superiors that football or men’s basketball stars handed in plagiarized work. The university took swift, decisive action, the authors write: It punished those who made the reports.”
Winning teams bring in more money, so recruiting the best high school talent is a top priority. Once they start playing, keeping them eligible is crucial. Because many of those players have weak academic skills and very little interest in coursework, universities across the land play the game of pretend education with them. UNC happened to get caught, then made things worse by trying to sweep the scandal under the rug with superficial “investigations” that said, “Move along, folks, nothing to see here.”
I have to take issue with Easterbrook on a couple of matters. First, he repeats that ridiculous trope about how “a bachelor’s degree adds about $1 million to lifetime earnings.” Oh, good grief. That statistic is just as nonsensical as the “one woman in five is sexually assaulted in college” one. That dubious average leads people to believe that getting a degree is like a winning lottery ticket that entitles you to a wonderful payout stream. It doesn’t. Huge numbers of college grads find themselves working in jobs that any reasonably good high school kid could do if it weren’t for the degree screening practiced by many employers.
Second, I think he overplays his hand in declaring that UNC “exploits” these student-athletes. I am certainly not defending educational malpractice by UNC or any other big sports university, but nothing prevents any student who wants to take some serious courses where the sporting adage “no pain, no gain” applies intellectually. The Athletic Department at UNC facilitated those students who merely wanted to play and enjoy the status on campus of being athletes, but lots of non-athletes manage the same thing — coasting through by finding easy courses. The football and basketball players who took the ersatz courses aren’t any worse off than other students who did the same thing. Talk about exploitation of the athletes (some of them at least) is a distraction from the big picture: that many colleges and universities have decided to enroll academically weak, disengaged students and keep them in school (and thus bringing in revenue) with easy-to-pass courses and inflated grades.