Reclaiming the Game

College Sports and Educational Values

William G. Bowen, Sarah A. Levin

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780691123141, 9780691116204
• eBook ISBN: 9781400840700
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Policy

In Reclaiming the Game, William Bowen and Sarah Levin disentangle the admissions and academic experiences of recruited athletes, walk-on athletes, and other students. In a field overwhelmed by reliance on anecdotes, the factual findings are striking--and sobering. Anyone seriously concerned about higher education will find it hard to wish away the evidence that athletic recruitment is problematic even at those schools that do not offer athletic scholarships.


Thanks to an expansion of the College and Beyond database that resulted in the highly influential studies The Shape of the River and The Game of Life, the authors are able to analyze in great detail the backgrounds, academic qualifications, and college outcomes of athletes and their classmates at thirty-three academically selective colleges and universities that do not offer athletic scholarships. They show that recruited athletes at these schools are as much as four times more likely to gain admission than are other applicants with similar academic credentials. The data also demonstrate that the typical recruit is substantially more likely to end up in the bottom third of the college class than is either the typical walk-on or the student who does not play college sports. Even more troubling is the dramatic evidence that recruited athletes "underperform:" they do even less well academically than predicted by their test scores and high school grades.


Over the last four decades, the athletic-academic divide on elite campuses has widened substantially. This book examines the forces that have been driving this process and presents concrete proposals for reform. At its core, Reclaiming the Game is an argument for re-establishing athletics as a means of fulfilling--instead of undermining--the educational missions of our colleges and universities.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

IN NO OTHER country in the world is athletics so embedded within the institutional structure of higher education as in the United States. This is true at all levels of play, from the highly publicized big-time programs that compete under the Division I banner of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) to small college programs that are of interest primarily to their own campus and alumni/ae communities. But to many sports fans, “serious” college sports are thought of almost exclusively in terms of Division I competition between highly skilled teams composed of students holding athletic scholarships. It is no surprise, therefore, that the ranking of the best and worst college sports programs introduced by U.S. News & World Report is concerned, at least in the first instance, only with play at this level.¹

However, as both university presidents and readers of the sports pages know well, the public exposure these programs receive is not always positive: the extensive reporting of events such as the resurgence of Notre Dame football, the bowl championship series, and basketball’s “March Madness” is regularly accompanied by commentary on the “dark side” of big-time sports.² In 2001 the Knight Commission published a second report calling for reform of Division I sports in stronger terms than ever before,³ and a week does not pass without one or more stories detailing some new recruiting scandal or lapse in academic standards, debating gender equity issues, commenting on rowdy behavior by athletes and other students, or speculating on the future course of the NCAA.

The academic downside of big-time sports has been recognized for a very long time—indeed, for at least a century.⁴ The generally unstated—or at least untested—assumption has been that all is well at colleges and universities that provide no athletic scholarships and treat college sports as a part of campus life, not as mass entertainment. The positive contribution of athletics in these contexts is emphasized on the sports pages of student newspapers, alumni/ae magazines, and official publications, which, taken together, provide a generally healthy corrective to a societal tendency to emphasize problems.⁵ The director of athletics and physical education at Bryn Mawr, Amy Campbell, surely spoke for many dedicated coaches and administrators at such schools when she wrote: “College athletics is a prized endeavor and one that enriches the experience of college students. The question should not be ‘at what price athletics’ but rather how to structure athletic programs that serve both the student athletic interest and the greater goals of liberal arts institutions.”⁶

We identify strongly with this pro-sports mindset and cannot imagine American college life without intercollegiate teams, playing fields, and vigorous intramural as well as recreational sports programs. But we are concerned that all is not well with athletic programs at many colleges and universities outside the orbit of big-time sports. One of our principal concerns is that widely publicized excesses and more subtle issues of balance and emphasis may undermine what many of us see as the beneficial impact of athletics. “Save us from our friends” is an old adage, and it has real applicability here. Zealous efforts to “improve programs,” boost won-lost records, and gain national prominence can have untoward effects that may erode the very values that athletic programs exist to promote—as well as the educational values that should be central to any college or university. From our perspective, the challenge is to strengthen, not weaken, the contribution that athletics makes to the overall educational experience of students and to the sense of “community” that is important not only to current students but also to graduates, faculty members, staff, and others who enjoy following college sports.

THIS BOOK—AND HOW IT DIFFERS FROM THE GAME OF LIFE

A principal thesis of this study is that there is an urgent need to recognize that the traditional values of college sports are threatened by the emergence of a growing “divide” between intercollegiate athletics and the academic missions of many institutions that are free of the special problems of “big-time” sports. Until recently, this problem was largely unrecognized. Readers (and reviewers) were very surprised by the evidence in our previous study, The Game of Life, that documented a persistent and widening split between academics and athletics at selective colleges and universities that offer no athletic scholarships, do not compete at the Division IA level, and presumably exemplify the “amateur” ideal.⁷

This new book is a direct response to requests by presidents of colleges and universities (and other interested parties) that we address a number of questions raised but not answered by The Game of Life.⁸ Many observers of the educational scene (including those of us who conducted the original study) were taken aback by the degree to which athletes at Ivy League universities and highly selective liberal arts colleges have underperformed academically, by which we mean that they have done less well academically than they would have been expected to do on the basis of their incoming academic credentials. (A box with definitions of frequently used terms, including underperformance, is provided later in this section.) To be sure, there were suspicions that increasing specialization in athletics, more intensive recruitment, and growing pressures to compete successfully in the postseason as well as during the regular season (combined with rising academic standards in general) were taking a toll on the academic performance of these athletes relative to that of their classmates. But no one could be sure this was true because no systematic data existed. The need to “find the facts” is what motivated the first study; the need to find more of the facts, and to understand them better, is what motivated this follow-up study.⁹

In seeking to fill in gaps that The Game of Life left open, Reclaiming the Game has several distinctive features.

First, the coverage of schools is both more inclusive and more focused. This study includes all 8 of the Ivy League universities and all 11 members of the New England Small College Athletic Conference (NESCAC); it also includes more universities in the University Athletic Association (UAA), an association of leading urban universities, and more liberal arts colleges outside the East.¹⁰ At the same time, it does not present new data for the Division IA private and public universities such as Stanford and Michigan that were part of the original study. The issues facing the big-time programs, although similar in some respects to the issues we are discussing here, are so different in other respects that it did not seem sensible to tackle both sets of questions in the same study.

Second, this book contains data for a much more recent class (the putative class of 1999, which entered college in the fall of 1995). This updating allows us to answer the important question of whether the increasing and spreading academic underperformance among athletes noted in The Game of Life had reached a peak at the time of the 1989 entering cohort (the most recent entering cohort included in that study) or whether this disturbing trend has continued.

Third, and perhaps most important, this new study incorporates an important methodological innovation: we are now able, as we were not in The Game of Life, to distinguish recruited athletes (those who were on coaches’ lists presented to admissions deans) from all other athletes (whom we call “walk-ons”). Thus we can deal directly with the extent to which it is the recruitment/admissions nexus that has created the academic-athletic divide. A pivotal question, which no one has been able to answer to date because the data did not exist, is to what extent recruited athletes perform differently, relative to their formal academic credentials, than other students—including walk-on athletes.

Fourth, in this study we probe much more deeply the causes of academic underperformance by athletes; in our view, this systematic underperformance is the most troubling aspect of the academic-athletic divide. Key questions include: Are problems of academic performance concentrated at the bottom of the SAT distribution, or do they extend more broadly? How do recruited athletes fare if they stop playing intercollegiate sports? How much attrition is there, and how does it correlate with performance? How did recruited athletes and walk-ons perform academically in years when they were not playing—as compared with how they did in years when they were competing?

Colleges and Universities Included in the Study:

Ivy League universities

Brown University

Columbia University

Cornell University

Dartmouth College

Harvard University

Princeton University

University of Pennsylvania

Yale University

UAA universities

Carnegie Mellon University

Emory University

University of Chicago

Washington University in St. Louis

Women’s colleges

Bryn Mawr College

Smith College

Wellesley College

NESCAC colleges

Amherst College

Bates College

Bowdoin College

Colby College

Connecticut College

Hamilton College

Middlebury College

Trinity College

Tufts University

Wesleyan University

Williams College

Coed liberal arts colleges (other)

Carleton College

Denison University

Kenyon College

Macalester College

Oberlin College

Pomona College

Swarthmore College

Fifth, in this study we present a far more “textured” explanation of processes such as recruitment and the role of coaches. Through conducting interviews, commissioning papers by athletic directors, and reviewing internal self-studies at specific colleges we have been able to gain a more nuanced understanding of both the dynamics of the present-day process of building intercollegiate teams, including the forces responsible for the steady widening of the athletic divide, and the consequences of the athletic divide.

Sixth, this study is more prescriptive than its predecessor: we include an extended discussion of why we regard the present “divide” as unacceptable from the standpoint of educational values, the kinds of reform efforts at both conference and national levels that seem to us especially promising, and the lessons about process and leadership that can be gleaned from recent experience. A frequent reaction to The Game of Life by college and university presidents, as well as by others, was: “All right. It is clear that there is a problem, but what are the main choices we have in considering what actions, if any, to take?” “What are the implications of just ‘staying the course’?” “Is it possible to sustain—and even enhance—the positive value of college sports without paying a large academic price?”¹¹

Frequently used terms:

Athlete:	Any student who was listed on the roster of an intercollegiate athletic team at any point in his or her college career.
Student at large:	Any student who was not listed on an athletic roster.
Recruited athlete:	A student who, as an applicant, was included on a coach’s list submitted to the admissions office.
Walk-on athlete:	An intercollegiate athlete who was not included on the coach’s list submitted to the admissions office.
High Profile sports:	Football, basketball, and men’s ice hockey—the sports that have historically received the most attention at many of the schools in this study.
Lower Profile sports:	All men’s sports other than the High Profile sports.
Admissions advantage	The likelihood of admission for a recruited athlete (or another type of student) relative to the likelihood of admission for a student at large with the same credentials.
Underperformance:	The phenomenon of a group’s having a lower GPA or rank-in-class than would be predicted on the basis of pre-college achievement and other observable characteristics.
Athletic divide:	The tendency for recruited athletes to differ systematically from students at large in academic credentials (such as SAT scores), in academic outcomes (such as majors chosen and rank-in-cla...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Chapter 1. Introduction
• Part A. Athletes on Campus Today
• Part B. Forces Creating the Athletic Divide
• Part C. The Higher Ground: A Reform Agenda
• Summary
• Notes
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Appendix Tables
• References
• Index