U.N.C. Investigation Reveals ‘Shadow Curriculum’ to Help Athletes

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/23/sports/university-of-north-carolina-investigation-reveals-shadow-curriculum-to-help-athletes.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&bicmp=AD&bicmlukp=WT.mc_id&bicmst=1409232722000&bicmet=1419773522000

by rgovind • 12 years ago

81 97 12 years ago

nytimes.com

csdrane• 12 years ago

Pretty shocking but I imagine this is just the tip of the iceberg.

w1ntermute2• 12 years ago

It's probably happening at a lot of other universities with big sports programs. UNC just happened to get caught.

RyJones• 12 years ago

Say, Stanford? http://www.stanforddaily.com/2011/03/09/1046687/

evanriley• 12 years ago

Oh, its probably happening at most universities. I went to N.C. State and would be surprised if it WASN'T happening there too. I assume any school which gets a amount of money from their sports program would have something similar to UNC.

JackFr• 12 years ago

While I don't believe UNC is necessarilly the only offender, this is not a case of 'everyones doing it'. There is a spectrum of practices which scholarship athletes typically use. Some are simple, practical and pretty much above reproach -- taking the fewest credits allowable during the season; taking academically rigorous course over the summer. Some start to get questionable -- at what point does intensive tutoring become the tutor actually doing the work. And then are no show classes and fake grades.

It's possible to be a scholarship athlete and get a real academic degree. I've seen people do it first hand. But it's hard -- you need to start with a decent academic background, and then work your ass off and most likely the social aspect of your college time will suffer.

That being said, even without the best academic background its possible to legitimately graduate if there is institutional support for it. The student might not have the most rigorous undergraduate course work, but they will have earned a degree equivalent to many non-athletes at the school. But for this to happen there needs to be institutional support both inside and outside the athletic department.

What's disturbing to me about UNC, is not just that they knowingly and persistently cheated, but that there behavior was purely and most basely exploitative -- they weren't even pretending to educate these students.

cellis2• 12 years ago

Sometimes I wonder why these requirements are there in the first place. Why not just be honest about it, pay the athletes and get on with the sports program. It's not like 80% of the degrees at most universities are worth anything anyways.

sillysaurus32• 12 years ago

Why is every semi-pro athlete expected to get a decent GPA in order to play on a university's football team? It's a completely different skillset. I don't blame players for ditching classes to pursue their dreams. Quite the opposite, in fact. It's the same drive as an entrepreneur's: to test yourself, to excel. It's just a different context.

They are adults. If, as adults, they choose not to pursue academic studies, and instead choose to focus all of their energy on sports, then they should be allowed to do that without putting their sports career at risk.

I do blame everyone involved in the fakeness, though. Their decisions should stand on their own.

JoeAltmaier3• 12 years ago

Sure; but they shouldn't be playing on a college team. As in, if you don't work at a company you shouldn't play on the company team.

sillysaurus32• 12 years ago

Why not? (I ask this in hopes of being persuaded, not to defend a position.)

dragonwriter4• 12 years ago

Why is every semi-pro athlete expected to get a decent GPA in order to play on a university's football team?

Because there are semi-pro teams and university teams, and the two things are not the same thing.

If, as adults, they choose not to pursue academic studies, and instead choose to focus all of their energy on sports, then they should be allowed to do that without putting their sports career at risk.

Sure, and if they choose to do that, they should do it somewhere other than an academic institution.

cellis2• 12 years ago

I disagree. Playing sports at the highest levels is an academic activity, it's just not recognized as an academic activity today. You definitely have to study, recognize patterns, solve problems, etc. Just not so much reading books and writing papers.

alistairSH2• 12 years ago

In the case of American football, skipping college isn't an option. The NFL doesn't recruit out of high school, so a player's only option is to do 3-4 years indentured servitude at an NCAA institution.

qq662• 12 years ago

They're not really playing sports at an academic institution... they're playing sports for a business that's got a joint branding contract with an academic institution.

rrrx35• 12 years ago

The problem is that they're being exploited. Choose to go to class or not, they are not being paid anything remotely close to the value that these schools get from them in terms of team gear sales, ad revenue, tv time, increased enrollment, etc etc etc.

This is especially true when they're turning in BS papers for crap degrees that can't and won't serve them once they leave school. A minuscule few make it pro. The rest - if they graduate, even - have only an AFAM degree to show for it and no real life skills.

I agree that if they want to be athletes, they should be allowed to be athletes. But they should be paid appropriately for it in kind.

mbreese2• 12 years ago

Well, they are getting compensation in terms of free tuition, room and board, etc... these things do have significant value. If they complete school, they get to walk away with a degree without any debt. That's not trivial.

However, the athletes are only able to actualize this compensation if they can freely choose their majors, are able to take the classes they want, and actually earn their education. By creating a secondary tier of classes, the school was deliberately exploiting them.

I think that the value of a degree (for an athlete) will vary greatly depending on the school. Some schools are more academically rigorous for athletes than others... UNC apparently was on the low end of the scale.

differentView• 12 years ago

they are not being paid anything remotely close to the value that these schools get from them in terms of team gear sales, ad revenue, tv time, increased enrollment, etc etc etc.

This is true for only a very small percentage of college athletes.

Most college sports don't generate a lot of money for their schools. Even the most popular sports, men's football and men's basketball, generate big money for a minority of elite programs.

brudgers• 12 years ago

In the case of gridiron football the system is a subsidy to the NFL which avoids player development costs...often at taxpayer expense. Likewise, the colleges pass off youth development costs to the public high school systems...again at taxpayer expense.

For the players. this form of amateurism means they have no power to negotiate contracts to offset the risks associated with the sport.

bo10242• 12 years ago

The problem is that they're being exploited. Choose to go to class or not, they are not being paid anything remotely close to the value that these schools get from them in terms of team gear sales, ad revenue, tv time, increased enrollment, etc etc etc.

I'm tired of seeing this argument without data. If you sit down and think about the numbers, you'll see that for the vast majority of NCAA athletes, this is false. Most get a very sweet deal relative to their market value if the NCAA did not exist.

First, limit to the NCAA sports that actually produce revenue, essentially men's football and basketball. If the NCAA did not exist, these players would at best be in a minor league (again except for the top dozen or two in the country). Now look at a sport that has a minor league in America: baseball. Minor league baseball players, even toward the top, make how much? $2000-3000 per month. And that's only in-season.

Paid tuition is already worth higher in cash value than that. And the value of the student-athlete experience? You can't put a price tag on it. Ask any former NCAA athlete what they would trade to give up their experience.

But, you respond, NCAA sports make way more money than baseball minor leagues. Yes, that's true. But it's not solely because of the players. It's because of the schools. Schools bring almost everything important to the table: A huge fanbase, a connection to a physical location and community, an illusion of amateur-ness, rivalries, all of these things you can't get to nearly that extent outside the NCAA.

The players? They have no bargaining power because without the NCAA system, they'd be hosed. They'd be working even harder for essentially less money, living a tougher lifestyle, and not even get the degree to show for it. Hard to argue they should be paid when they bring very little to the table compared to the schools.

The point people miss is that it's the combination of the schools and the players together that generates so much revenue. Either without the other would be out of luck. And right now, if you think about the numbers, the current split is pretty fair. The exception might be the few star players who could make millions in the pros.

...

I want to say, I'm not saying that players aren't exploited currently. I think they are. But I think the exploitation boils down to your second paragraph: They lose a real education because they don't have their priorities in line at that point in their lives.

But the solution isn't to pay kids even more money/benefits to continue to masquerade as students while living as full-time athletes. The solution should be to divorce sports from education and create minor leagues. This will never happen because, as I stated above, it's the combination of schools and sports that generates so much money, and the people at the top won't give that up just to do the right thing.

wolf_cook• 12 years ago

While I agree with this perspective on athletics at a university, it does seem like it ought to be an issue with the school's academic accreditation. I don't believe that a university that practices this should have their degrees recognized this way.

I will say that I'm not really sure who values this certification though.

cma• 12 years ago

The replies are saying the schools provide prestige, visibility to scouts, and training/coaching/advice.

Change the terms in your post and theirs a bit, and I can't tell if we are talking about exploiting footballers or participants in the YCombinator program.

jordanpg2• 12 years ago

The GPA requirement is incidental. It happens to be the barrier to playing ball.

There is a straightforward economic incentive (money) for both the school and the athletes to practice more and win more, and it plainly has nothing to do with academics, whatever the grand rhetoric about student athletes. As with all such situations, when there is a barrier to economic success, the system will gradually evolve to short circuit those barriers (cheating) as much as is possible within the confines of the rules. This is well documented by now. I have to imagine that UNC was just unlucky enough to get caught.

SeanLuke• 12 years ago

Why is every semi-pro athlete expected to get a decent GPA in order to play on a university's football team?

Because they are not semi-pro athletes. They are university students first and amateur athletes second. Or at least that's what's being claimed. And as students, they have to pass the same general education curriculum as every other student in the university, and to the same standards.

If, as adults, they choose not to pursue academic studies, and instead choose to focus all of their energy on sports, then they should be allowed to do that without putting their sports career at risk.

Sure. But this should be done outside of a university environment. The problem is not that athletes expected to be good students. The problem is that in the US they are expected to be students at all.

pXMzR2A• 12 years ago

get a decent GPA

A 2.0 is not a decent grade nor GPA, it means you're failing at most of your classes and will probably be expelled.

Btw, your argument is "leave the school and pursue sports." I just found that interesting, that's all.

Alex39172• 12 years ago

I'd highly recommend the documentary Schooled: The Price of College Sports. It shows many interviews with the students, coaches, and staff involved with this situation. (Also free w/ Amazon Prime.)

IvyMike• 12 years ago

MLB has the minor leagues as their feeder program.

The NFL has college football as their feeder program.

There are a lot of tradeoffs, but in the end I think the MLB's system is better. To me, the charade of "student athletes" in football gets more and more strained each year.

The question is if they did want to transition to a minor league football system, how can you go from here to there in an orderly fashion?

remarkEon2• 12 years ago

I honestly don't think it would be possible. College Football is something that is so culturally engrained in America that even tinkering with it a little bit (like adding a tiny 4 team playoff) is met with huge amounts of skepticism. The MLB's system is also different because, on average, it takes longer to develop the typical player post-college. Obviously there are player outliers, but baseball is much more technical than football - which sort of justifies the entire farm system in and of itself. The incubation period is just typically longer.

cpwright2• 12 years ago

It seems like you could assign each existing NFL franchise the right to have a minor league franchise (maybe let them bid or have a lottery for the rights to specific cities); and then draft out of high-school and college rather than just out of college.

The player's union would clearly have something to say about it, particularly if they can easily bring players up and down mid-season based on injuries or performance.

remarkEon2• 12 years ago

Maybe. But you'd have to convince the NFL that a minor league is something worth investing in. A longer pipeline of higher volume of play means that the risk of injury would be substantially higher. The NFL seems more interesting in making money that dealing with anything more complex than moving a team to London.

zaidf• 12 years ago

I graduated from UNC's Communication Studies program, one that many athletes sign up for. I took classes with many of the athletes, including half of our championship basketball team. I can honestly say I did not find any organized attempts on part of the professors to provide underhanded help to athletes. So if it happened, it was by administrators, away from the sight of the rest of students/instructors.

Even then, I am a bit surprised. I remember athlete friends being super concerned about their attendance and passing. In almost every class, we'd get someone drop by while class was in session to check if the athletes in the class were in actually there.

nkozyra2• 12 years ago

With regard to college athletes ...

I think they should be on a college team.

I think they should be going to college.

I do not think they should be paid.

Like most people, they are preparing for their future in the field of their interest.

The issue, in my opinion, is that we attempt to shoehorn them into "traditional" curriculum. They're forced to choose a major, often funneled into the easiest thing just to get through.

Fundamentally, the majority are in college to learn and prepare for life as a professional athlete (assuming we're talking about the "Big 3" sports). Let's allow them to do that. Let's provide programs that focus on that, that teach sport fundamentals, dealing with the media, managing money, dealing with agents, fundamentals of business, etc. Let's also provide routes for post-professional-sport life, like lower-level media classes, etc.

We seem to have an aversion to treating a lucrative and very real profession like something that warrants education.

Edit: The problem with $ and athletes largely applies solely to football, wherein the NCAA and NFL have colluded to force high school talent to play somewhere for three years after graduation. This is arbitrary and stupid, and forces kids into programs they don't care about, for institutions that they don't care about. This is the primary issue with not paying players. It's not that colleges don't pay, it's that there's no other opportunity to get paid.

crassus2• 12 years ago

Problem is, only 1.7% of college football players are ever going to play professional ball.

nkozyra2• 12 years ago

I think the % is higher, even if we're talking about practice squads.

As mentioned, the curriculum would also include tangentially related fields.

tzs• 12 years ago

The NCAA is basically a joke when it comes to enforcing their rules on academic standards. This was made clear a couple years ago, when they hit Caltech with big penalties for lax academic standards, while basically ignoring things like the UNC scandal.

Caltech was fact was technically in violation, because it allows students to spend the first three weeks of each term taking classes without registering for them. The idea is that students can sample several classes they are interested in, then decide which they will stick with, and then register. For this three weeks, they are doing the work from all of the classes they are sampling.

However, since they are not registered for a full academic load during that three weeks, they count as part-time students, not full-time students, and so are ineligible for NCAA sports. Caltech's new director of athletics noticed this, stopped the violations, and reported his department to the NCAA.

The reaction of the press, both general and sports (Google "NCAA caltech" for details), was generally to make fun of the NCAA, and point out all the serious athletic schools routinely committing much worse, much more intentional violations.

Of course, some of the major sanctions won't have any effect. For instance, Caltech was banned from postseason play for one year. Considering that most Caltech teams are in the midst of years or even decades long losing streaks in conference play, they aren't going near the postseason anyway. They also banned off-campus recruiting...which Caltech doesn't do.

The only sanction that might have actually been noticeable was wiping out all wins of the ineligible teams. There was some initial concern that this would wipe out the basketball win over Occidental earlier that year that had snapped a 26 year, 310 conference game losing streak [1]. It turned out all the players on that team had been eligible, so the win stands.

[1] A movie was made about this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Hoops

qq662• 12 years ago

"Lax academic standards" at Caltech... now I've seen everything.

eli_gottlieb• 12 years ago

However, since they are not registered for a full academic load during that three weeks, they count as part-time students, not full-time students, and so are ineligible for NCAA sports. Caltech's new director of athletics noticed this, stopped the violations, and reported his department to the NCAA.

That's bloody ridiculous. Add-drop period is practiced at almost all real universities.

Chevalier3• 12 years ago

Honestly, doesn't this make anyone wonder what the point is of college in the first place? Even without the equivalent of special ed courses, it's not like most (any?) athletes study STEM courses that might require university certification. Literally the only point of their enrollment is to make money for the school, then shuffle off with a communications degree and work in a shoe store the rest of their lives.

Yes, they can get drunk and get laid for a couple years, and if they're really good they might not have to borrow too much money for the privilege. But what a complete waste of time for everyone involved. They take pointless courses for worthless degrees so the student body can burn cars when balls are thrown correctly.

Europeans have the right approach to education, even if they're still too credential-obsessed. Nobody cares about college sports, nobody goes into debt pursuing their degrees, and everyone can enter the work force much younger and start earning a few extra years of salary.

eitally2• 12 years ago

I mostly disagree with your premise. This is a problem that only really afflicts two college sports: football & basketball, which are not coincidentally the only revenue sports at most schools. Most student-athletes take academics as seriously as their sport(s), and I think the fact that American colleges & universities offer top quality athletic programs as well as academic educations one of the best things about them.

That said, football & basketball are completely out of hand, not to mention the playoff/BCS/NCAA Tournament system, TV/media rights, and the insanity of one-and-done feeder systems into the NBA (I'm looking at you, Kentucky!). Those athletes should be paid and they should potentially be employed by the colleges as athletes completely separately from any academic matriculation.

Chevalier3• 12 years ago

Well, I agree with you that the rowing/badminton/chess teams probably don't get special treatment. But you don't seem to question the value of "top quality athletic programs." Why do we want them to exist in the first place?

The ostensible point of university is to develop a student's mind to solve problems -- preferably in the real world, though humanities programs insist that paying $50k+/year to read poetry is just as valuable an investment. Even if you take that assertion at face value, I'm not sure anyone, anywhere pretends that playing basketball prepares the student-athlete for anything at all. Almost none of them have a chance at a professional sports contract. Most will graduate with useless majors, having squandered their youth and their health on pointless competitions to throw a ball in a hoop. It's STUPID. Everyone involved is wasting their time.

I'm all for athletics in colleges. I played intramural sports and enjoyed it, because nobody pretended that it mattered. But I really don't see a compelling case for the subsidy of organized college sports... which, like someone pointed out, is really just a a subsidy for professional organizations.

And it's not just the pointless waste of time and money in college sports. The argument for college as an institution is getting weaker and weaker as free online alternatives get better and better. Aside from getting drunk and cheering against UMichigan, what compelling features does Ohio State University offer versus Harvard's courses on edX?

ericboggs• 12 years ago

UNC grad here. These "paper" classes were very well known when I was an undergrad.

Your university almost certainly had similar classes that were very easy and required very little attendance...and were always full of athletes and lazy seniors looking to pump up their GPA.

You can't fault the students (athletes or otherwise) for finding a shortcut in the system and then exploiting it. It is the university's responsibility to quality control its curriculum.

eitally2• 12 years ago

Agree 100%. And -- even if they took "real" classes, all the high profile athletes have private tutors, too, who may well do a large portion of their work for them.

redraga• 12 years ago

European football (soccer) teams run academies of their own to groom players. If a youngster is serious about becoming a professional footballer, he/she joins these academies. They are given a "well-rounded" education, but the emphasis is obviously on the sport. Graduates end being signed by the parent club, or getting contracts with lower-level teams if they can make the cut.

I'm curious to understand why this system isn't practiced in the US.

iends3• 12 years ago

I wasn't a particularly great soccer player in middle school and highschool (some players on the club team ended up playing D3 soccer at small colleges), but the academies really didn't exist in America 20 years ago when I started playing as a kid.

Things are much different now many of the clubs in MLS, NASL, and USL have their own academies where the players are coached by professional coaches or pro players at starting very young ages. One local example is: http://www.capitalarearailhawks.com/

The model is much different, though. Generally the goal with most of these academies is to make a college team.

U.N.C. Investigation Reveals ‘Shadow Curriculum’ to Help Athletes

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