THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

last year the michigan football was pretty awful but still managed to sell over 100,000 tickets to all their home games.  theres also a huge separation of college football talent the top D1 schools and the D1AA yet the D1AA schools (and the terrible D1 schools) still have passionate fan bases that dont ‘follow the talent’ and abandon their alma mater.  i dont think you will ever see big time college football or basketball fans stop rooting for their team because of talent migration.  the fan bases are too entrenched, and the sports are perfect for gambling, so they will remain in the media spotlight.  its not like people will just start following a minor league because a guy that got recruited at their school choose instead to get paid in money and not education.  i mean in basketball the best talent leaves after 1 year, but the NCAA tournament is as profitable as ever.

i think the best solution is to have both, like baseball, or hockey.  dont lots of canadian players choose to take a scholarship?  and NCAA baseball is still followed by many.  ideally the players coming out of high school would have a choice, pros in the minor leagues or NCAA scholarship (which includes the value of free publicity).  theres room for both, especially since NCAA sports arent going away any time soon.  i also think comparisons to europe et al are going to be difficult given how differently the institutions of higher education evolved in their respective parts of the globe (though i would be plenty interested in learning more about how things are done there anyway). 

or is what you’re suggesting is a professionalization of D1 NCAA football, that keeps the teams affiliated with the schools but pays them? there was a big op-ed in the journal by an agent suggesting something like that that i cant for the life of me find a link to now, but it was an interesting idea.

the BS, to me, is the age restrictions the NFL and the NBA put on their draft picks, which from the cynical point off view are designed to save them the costs and risks of setting up and paying for their own minor leagues since they know the NCAA will do it for them.  they get free development of talent, publicity (would tim tebow have sold any jerseys for the broncos if he had gone from home schooling to the minor leagues to the broncos 3rd strong QB?) and competition to help them evaluate the talent.  in return the schools get better players to help their fund raising events. 

in my perfect world, this age discrimination is abolished and the leagues are forced to come up with their own minor leagues (or better ones then the useless NFL Europe and the NBDL).  now players can take the money or the scholarship and everyone wins. 

sorry for the long winded and rambling comment - bottom line though is i think there is plenty of room for both systems to flourish simultaneously.

In the perfect world, you let the free market decide.

As it stands, the NCAA has already built this enormous profitable structure that is a serious barrier for entry.  They are leveraging the needs of teenagers who are quite limited in their choices, and who are in no position to be risk-takers.

Basically, they’ve got the first-to-market advantage.

so what needs to happen for the market to be “free”?  i’m not convinced there is support for an independent minor league in football or basketball, which are free to operate if people wanted to start one.  a pro summer football league, yes, and i am continually baffled why this has happened yet.

My problem with the NCAA isn’t that they don’t pay athletes. They do, and it’s called a scholarship.  With most colleges costing around $40,000 a year, that’s pretty big money.

My problem is that the NCAA, for some reason, thinks it’s unfair for alumni to waste their own money recruiting athletes. If some booster wants to buy a college athlete’s poor mother a new house, go to it!  It’s gotten to the point where I can’t talk to a high school player from my home town about going to my alma mater without committing a recruiting violation.  I wish someone would create major college league just to stick it to the NCAA.  Take away their money, or their control of the money, and they’ll fall apart.

Canadian kids don’t tend to go for US college scholarships. 

Several reasons: 1) It delays income potential by several years. 2) Colleges are still trying to have good teams, so it is to their advantage to sign 20-year-olds instead of 18-year-olds (in football and basketball, they don’t really have this choice). 3) The NCAA is not the strongest league a 19-year-old kid could be playing in.  4) Less of a tradition of “student-athletes” in Canada.  5) Also, Canadian kids get paid to play junior.  They’re not supposed to, but nobody really polices it. 

The craziest thing to me is that junior hockey players (even 16-year-olds) can be traded.  How that system persists is beyond me.

I think something like 80% of American NHL players (historically) have played NCAA.  Even with the growth of the USHL, they still go to college before going to the NHL.

With most colleges costing around $40,000 a year, that’s pretty big money.

Not to Lebron James.

That’s the point with a socialist policy: give every student-athlete the same benefit, regardless of how much he is worth.

Ideally, you separate the school from the athletics program, and let players negotiate as they see fit.  This is America, isn’t it?

I think something like 80% of American NHL players (historically) have played NCAA. 

Not insignificantly, you’ll get a superstar American teenager (high schooler) like Pat Lafontaine who goes to play on a Montreal Junior team (so he can play against the likes of a slightly younger Mario Lemieux). 

That’s more a testament of high school hockey in USA more than anything.  But still, there’s no reason to tie sports to schools, other than “tradition” and socialism.

Tom - can you be more specific with you plan for “separating” sports from schools?  would it only be for football and basketball?  is there anything wrong with baseball’s system?

sports are tied to school for one very important reason, and thats because athletics are an integral part of education.  which is why there is gym class starting in elementary school.  you shouldnt divorce sports from schools anymore than you should the theater, music or philosophy departments (in my opinion).

Okay, first of all, socialist? Really, that’s the term you’re going to use? I thought certain US political factions had already distorted the term beyond recognition. I didn’t expect to see it even more twisted out of shape here.

Second of all, the argument about whether players create most of the school’s value is almost completely irrelevant. The product that the schools put their brand on is sport, and without athletes you don’t have sport. It doesn’t matter whether the level of revenue varies with the performance of the athletes (well it does, if you want to argue about the distribution of compensation, but not if you want to argue about its existence altogether). What matters is that you don’t have that value without the investment in the players in the first place.

Third of all, let’s focus on who’s really responsible here. The reason why college basketball and football players can’t skip college altogether is because the NFL and NBA have age limits that prevent this from happening (I don’t know about the NHL myself, but I know the MLS and MLB don’t prevent players skipping college). If there’s any (ugh) socialism, it’s the result of the NFL and NBA distorting the market, not the NCAA ignoring it. Which brings me to my final point…

...fourth of all, contrary to neo-classical fantasy, there’s no such thing as a perfect market. And even if there were, they don’t result in perfect worlds of any sort. When it comes to sports, which are essentially cartelized, there’s absolutely no such thing as a free market, so that point is absolutely market.

I also think it is unfair for the NBA in cohoots with the NCAA to have a 19+1 rule in place.  It almost seems illegal.  Is there any other job besides a Congressman, POTUS, or someone that serves alcohol that puts an age limit > 18 on whether or not they can be employed?  If you can fight in Iraq or Afghanistan at the age of 18, you should be given the opportunity to play in the NBA at that same age.

I also believe that college athletes should get paid.  Not sure on the best methodology if you are going to keep it within the framework of collegiate sports as opposed to a minor league system.  I suppose you could make each high school or JC athlete a free agent, where they sign for X number of years (4 max).  If they want to leave early, they have to buy out a portion of their remaining contract.  Rich schools would obviously do better, but that is kind of what we have now anyways.  You could put some kind of salary cap in place but that starts to get messy and then you have to still worry about policing under the table payments.  College players are also free to go play in European and Asian leagues.

But one other benefit the players have in the current system is that the NCAA does a great job of marketing their better players.  The good players, especially at the better schools get a lot of TV exposure which undoubtedly helps them get scouted by NBA teams.  This marketing definitely has a big dollar value on top of the dollar value the college scholarship has.

That said, I feel that scholarships are an entirely appropriate compensation for athletes, however rules prevent players from taking any sort of outside compensation, or holding attorneys (http://www.bizofbaseball.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=4695:potential-mlb-players-trapped-by-ncaas-arcane-rule&catid=68:jordan-kobritz&Itemid=156) are over-restrictive.

sports are tied to school for one very important reason, and thats because athletics are an integral part of education

Again, go back to my point: there’s an entire planet out there.  Take for example McGill in Montreal, which is probably the closest thing to Harvard there is in Canada (no offense to other Canadian universities).  They have hockey teams, etc, but they are way down in the totem pole.  I don’t think there’s a single prospect playing hockey at McGill.  So, yes, you have athletics in schools.  But, it’s not big-business athletics.  That is reserved for the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League.

The issue here is about how NCAA has cartelized (great word!) big-business athletics.  These pre-professional players have ALOT of value.  Tons of value.  Sidney Crosby had ALOT of value prior to being drafted by the Penguins.  It’s all about who is going to make money off his back before he has a chance at the big pay day.  There’s this entire structure built around siphoning off the income-generation power of young people.

The NCAA blunts this by paying through scholarships.  Are they paying the right amount?  Well, there’s no mechanism in place to assure that.  And that’s the problem.  In addition to that, each player receives equal compensation, regardless of their value.  Call that whatever you want.  I called it socialistic.  Feel free to use whatever word you want.

Well, the NCAA is America’s training environment for sports, right or wrong (and that’s a major debate, just not one I’m particularly interested in). These athletes have great potential value, in that no matter how good they are they’re not generating the same type of revenue in the NCAA as they would in a pro context. NCAA sports are by-in-large unprofitable, even the big programs with very few exceptions.

What I’m saying is that there’s no moral hazard in paying what are essentially trainees less than what you pay matriculated employees. Yes, LeBron James in a pro-context is worth more than the 40k a year he might have made at Duke through scholarships (and more than the resultant value of the education might entail). But they do get compensated once they matriculate (are drafted). I don’t think this is socialism; perhaps it’s equivalent to a guild system (which, I’ll allow, isn’t capitalism, but I don’t think that’s necessarily what the goal should be).

Now, certain employees (like LeBron) are good enough to skip the trainee phase. The fact that college football and basketball players cannot is the major issue here, in my opinion, when it comes to compensation. In other words, it’s not a problem if they can just skip this phase, as you can in the MLB and MLS.

This leaves the sad case of players who ruin their careers while in college, leaving without appropriate compensation, but this isn’t an issue if the NFL and NBA themselves allow players to skip college.

This also leaves the issue of universities who are able to license a player’s likeness without using their names, on apparel and in video games. This is absolutely unconscionable. When I bought an #50 UConn Jersey in 2004, was there any question that it wasn’t Emeka Okafor’s? Would I have even bought it if it weren’t Emeka Okafor’s? Of course not. He should have gotten licensing revenue for it. Why not put this money in escrow and pay it when they go pro if you don’t wanna pay good players while they’re in college?

The schools use major NCAA sports as marketing to attract actual paying enrolled students.  There have been studies where schools that win the NCAA D1 football championship get significant bumps in student applications the following years.  That is what big-time college sports is about now, promoting the school’s brand to increase the number of applicants.  The typical excuse of alumni support is really secondary to that consideration.

we pretty much agree but i think you are exaggerating here:  “There’s this entire structure built around siphoning off the income-generation power of young people.”

and again, i wish you would be more specific about the mechanism for how youd now go about divorcing big business NCAA sports (which means just football and basketball, right?).  college football and basketball is going to be big business no matter where the talent goes.  basketball players already have an opportunity to go make money in europe if they dont want to be ‘exploited’ in the NCAA.  football has fewer options for graduating high schoolers but they could go play in the canadian football league if they wanted to.  i think baseball offers the fairest choice - go pro or go to college, its your choice. that seems a lot like how canadian hockey is set up.  if someone thinks a mcgill scholarship is worth 4 years in the semi pros, they could get a scholarship, no?

so what would you do?  have congress rule that the NCAA is illegal, and force someone to start a pro league for every college sport?  force the NCAA to change their rules?  force the NFL and NBA to abolish their age discrimination practices?  the market is free for entrepreneurs to start their own private sports leagues and try to convince college athletes to forgo their scholarships and get paid, it just doesnt seem like the market is supporting it right now.  unless you think it is socialist for college sports fans to root fanatically for their schools teams.  i wouldnt mind seeing SEC football fans be outlawed, personally (just kidding to any SEC fans here).

and again, i wish you would be more specific about the mechanism for how youd now go about divorcing big business NCAA sports

I don’t have a solution.  What I am saying is that if you were to start from scratch, USA would look more like Junior Hockey Leagues and soccer academies.

The problem is you have an existing cartel, which would be hard to break up.

"What I am saying is that if you were to start from scratch, USA would look more like Junior Hockey Leagues and soccer academies.” yeah, ideally.  but you’d also have to start the university system over from scratch.  i blame walter camp and the ivy league (the OG of cartels).

Thanks to the very odd interpretation of the antitrust exemptions for sports leagues, if we were to get a junior league anywhere it’d be in basketball and football. What if, when the UFL inevitably folds, they decided to convert themselves into a junior league and offered college athletes market rate?

Actually, do they have an age limit? Why aren’t they doing this yet?

I agree with Tango that it is “tradition” that binds sports with schools in the United States.  I also agree that the formation of a separate league with paid players would be better for fans, alumni, and athletes.  I think it would benefit everyone except for the schools themselves (who don’t need any more benefits).  However, would this new league be exempt from Title IX?  I hate to sound chauvinistic, but Title IX is another efficiency of collegiate athletics in this country.  It distributes money to unprofitable programs that have little market appeal.

My university has profitable football and basketball programs (a rarity - most schools lose money on basketball) that support all the other programs from the rifle team to cross country.  While the athletic department receives no university funding, I would still rather see these programs either provide for themselves or discontinued.  My friends and I find that baseball players, track and field athletes, and volleyball players are much more irritating to the rest of the student population.  Many of these athletes receive some tuition funding and ALL athletes at my school receive free tutoring.

I don’t begrudge the football and basketball players; they deserve far more than they receive.  However, I wonder if a volleyball player earns recognition for the school that a student with a prestigious academic award does?  I know that I looked more at academic accomplishments than volleyball performance when I applied to school.

I’ve gotten off track a bit, but I wish that players in profitable programs would be properly compensated and players in other programs would pay their way like other students.  One last note, it is ridiculous to force one-and-done basketball players and NFL prospects to attend class when it doesn’t prepare them for their chosen field.

How much money do Junior Hockey players make? More than $40,000 a year? How many of them make it into the league? How many of those that don’t make it to the next level end up (or have the opportunity to end up) with a college degree?

College costs alot less in Canada.

Also, Junior hockey players are in large part still in high school.

So what do college age playes do? Are they in the AHL by then? Still playing Juniors? Out of hockey?

Xeifrank, you actually only need to be 18 to serve alcohol (at least in Massachusetts, but I think it’s federal).  So it’s really only those positions in public office that require an age over 18… and I agree it seems illegal.

I really hate the attitude displayed in the quoted post.  Sure, the brand is probably important, but think of it as kind of a stamp that indicates in a shorthand way the level of quality of the program.

That brand has to be built on something, and whether those raw materials (ie. the players) are long-term fixtures (like in major pro leagues) or an endlessly rotating cast of shorter-term guys (like in college), they’re still the ones doing the work and delivering the entertainment, and in the case of college sports they’re being seriously exploited.

Check out the articles from the other day about that college football player who killed himself, for example.  He had dementia.  These guys destroy their bodies, and it is against the rules for them to be compensated properly.

Any system where such a large proportion of the top participants cheat financially has serious structural problems.

#21 - does college cost less in canada because its worth less or because it’s subsidized?  if a full ride at a top tier university anywhere in the world runs $50K/year in the open market, doesnt that mean a college scholarship is worth $50K regardless of whether you could have gotten subsidized instate tuition or not?  in-state in the US is a lot cheaper than private schools too, that doesnt mean a scholarship is ‘worth’ any less. 

im still not saying the players arent losing out on some of the money theyre helping the NCAA earn, but most, or at least a good portion, of that money gets plowed back into the university system, not to mention the fact that so any schools, which is good because those schools can go out there any find under served youths and provide opportunities for them, which is preferable, to me, than to have just the rich kids whose parents can afford to send them to sports clubs make it onto semi pro teams. 

i still think a legitimate minor league for college age football and basketball players would be nice but i think realistically the best fix is 1) elimination of age restrictions for NFL and NBA and 2) relaxation of “amateur” rules for NCAA athletes.  but stopping big money college sports is a) impossible and b) not something you’d want to do anyway.

@lincolndude: Agree entirely. The brand doesn’t have value if the product is absent. No workers, no product. The relative value of the individual laborer is irrelevant to this issue.

Colleges in Canada are government-subsidized.  For example, a Quebec resident / Canadian citizen pays almost $70 per credit, or 2,000$ a year (10 courses / 30 credits).

International students pay 20,000$ a year, so I guess that means that the government covers 90% of the cost for its in-province citizens.

http://www.mcgill.ca/student-accounts/fees/tuition/citizenship/

There’s no question that my kid, being a dual citizen, is not going to college in USA.

I have so much to say against the NCAA, where to start…

Well, first, I’d like to point out that in the NBA and NFL, players receive around ~58% of revenues or so.  At the University of Texas, football players receive less than 4% of the revenues brought in by the football program.  That data is from:
http://www2.indystar.com/NCAA_financial_reports/

I think Texas is on the extreme for that, but looking at a school like Arizona State, it’s still not much more than 10% (revenues/student aid), and all that payment is in the form of scholarships, rather than money.  Another point to consider is graduation rates of these players.  Seems promoting education is a great and worthy goal, but if an athlete doesn’t graduate (or graduates with a nothing degree), what are they really getting “paid” from that scholarship?  I think it’s safe to say that a scholarship is NOT enough compensation for a BCS conference football player.

Next, I find the issue of “brand”....incomplete.  Sure, a school has a brand and the connection between school and sports undoubtably has some value.  However, the sports team itself seems like a “brand” to me, as well.  Notre Dame football is a brand, and a seperate brand from Notre Dame.  You can see this in a variety of ways, from the difference in how other sports are supported by the Notre Dame community to how a football teams past success influences its current support.  Notre Dame football is the brand it is because of it’s past success at football.  Take that away and the school is still there, but not the same level of support.

Well, I’ll leave it at that.  The players are getting a raw deal, and there doesn’t seem to be much they can do about it.  They can’t start a professional league because the college sports already own that market, and it’s not like the fans benefit from a professional league.  Seems a lot of people are content to let the system stay the way it is simply because we like college sports.  Dunno why.  Seems like we could both keep college sports while changing the sytem to give the players a lot closer to what they deserve…

“Well, first, I’d like to point out that in the NBA and NFL, players receive around ~58% of revenues or so.  At the University of Texas, football players receive less than 4% of the revenues brought in by the football program.  That data is from:
http://www2.indystar.com/NCAA_financial_reports/

Well yes, but the NFL turns a profit. In other words, the NFL makes money off of its employees. I don’t know about Texas specifically, but the NCAA does not turn a profit--it’s not even close. NCAA schools spend more on their programs, and thus the athletes, than they take in, so I’m skeptical of the argument that they’re “making money off of the athletes” as it is often made.

This doesn’t mean I don’t think students should be compensated as athletes, but let’s not compare the FBS/FCS to the NFL, or NCAAB to the NBA. It’s not the same situation.

And before you say I don’t think profitable industries should compensate their employees, that’s not what I’m getting at. What I’m getting at is that the NCAA and NFL exist for different reasons, with different purposes. The NFL is a for-profit cartel, the NCAA is a not-for-profit cartel. It doesn’t exist so that schools invest in athlete-employees in order to generate revenue.

Rather, the NCAA exists as a symbiotic relationship (if not entirely balanced) between education and student athletics. The entire point is to exchange a paid-education for alumni entertainment and brand enhancement. The point of the NFL is to exchange money for more money, like any other for-profit enterprise.

The NCAA relationship may be more parasitic than symbiotic--I think this is the real argument here. But the NCAA is not meant to mimic pro-sports leagues, and I don’t think comparing the two institutions provides us with any understanding of this situation.

There is a difference between, NCAA does not turn a profit and NCAA football programs don’t turn a profit, right?  Aren’t the monies made by the football, basketball or any of the profitable programs then used to subsidized the rest of the athletic department to the point that a profit is not made?
vr, Xei

@Xei: If I have my figures right, NCAAF and NCAAB account for a majority of the revenue, but there’s still only a handful of basketball and football programs that do pay for themselves out of the hundreds from around the country.

Football and basketball bring in a lot more money, but they typically cost even more. Football rosters are huge, and almost all football and men’s basketball players are on full scholarship. Very few programs outside of NCAAF, NCAAB and NCAAW fully fund their athlete’s tuition. On top of that, there’s marketing costs, stadium costs, recruiting costs which far outpace those of the other sports.

So, if someone wants to double check me on this I’d appreciate it. But I’m pretty sure that the basketball and football programs that do turn a surplus (or break even) are outliers.

@28: Thanks, your first two paragraphs said most of what I wanted to say.  (And much better and more concisely than I would have.)

@29: I do not believe that the NCAA (and especially the bigger schools) do not turn a profit.  Look at the huge facilities improvements that are made regularly at those schools.  Do they do that because they need to?  No, they do it because they need to spend enough money to not be profitable (or at least not significantly so; I’ll get to why).  Is there really any excuse for paying coaches millions of dollars, either?

Several other things need to be mentioned in this discussion:

Basically no money made in the sports programs makes its way back to the main school budget.  It doesn’t go into the endowments, nor into academic scholarships, nor into capital improvements (outside of the aforementioned bettering of sports facilities).

These programs are also tax exempt, because the schools are non-profit (remember I said they needed to spend money to not be profitable?  This is why).

And just as a side note, since I’m already ranting about college sports, let’s remember that the reason the programs exist at all at schools is to teach sportsmanship, and fair play, and things like that.

I went to a Duke preseason basketball game last season.  Up by more than 50 (keep in mind that the largest NCAAB comeback ever was only from being down 32 or so), they were still running fast breaks and attempting three pointers.  Does it sound like they were learning any of those lessons?  And Duke is reputedly one of the better schools for that sort of thing.

That might have been an extreme example (honestly, I don’t know), but there’s certainly no shortage of examples of college football teams running up the score.

J-Doug, my belief is that your take isn’t too accurate.  I was just looking through a few of the programs a week or so ago because of a similar conversation, and basically all the major schools (6 major conferences) turn huge profits off football, and usually basketball as well.  I didn’t look at any schools outside those conferences so I dunno, nor did I look at the population from the 6 conferences, so of course I’m only going on whatever ones I did look at.

I do think your point about making a profit is relevant, but the problem is while schools don’t really make a profit on their athletic departments, which tends to be true I think, they DO make money, and lots of it, off football and basketball (which is then used to fund everything else, because pretty much all other sports lose money).  You can go through lots and lots of programs in the link I provided earlier if you care to check.  Big football programs are taking in 8 figures, and many of them take in 8 figures in just profits.  85 scholarships costs ~2-3 million.  NCAA football and basketball really do make profits, and substantial ones.

College-age players can play junior until age 20 (or 21 in some cases.) At that point, there’s Canadian university hockey or minor pro.  The AHL has very few young players.

Canadian universities are all public.  So the big ones don’t look a whole lot different from their state counterparts just across the border.  Tango’s Harvard comparison (7:1 student-faculty ratio) vs McGill (20:1) isn’t quite right.

The best Canadian university is the University of Toronto, which is probably on a par with the University of Michigan or maybe UCLA.  Tuition and fees are a little cheaper in Canada - except in Quebec, where they’re way cheaper.

Okay, so a good number of schools turn a profit, or at least we can say a good number of public schools turned a profit five years ago, according to this data. It’s still not worth comparing the two institutions. They exist for different purposes and the revenue ratios have nothing to do with each other.

Moreover, this is all irrelevant so long as the players have the opportunity to skip college if they so choose. The fact that they don’t is the real problem.

Markets determine fair prices so long as A) information about alternatives is close to complete and B) there is relative freedom of choice among alternatives. A is not a problem here, but B is, and the source of ~B is the age restrictions in the NFL and NBA. Yes, these restrictions are at the behest of the NCAA, but it’s the pro leagues that hold all the cards here. Remove the restrictions, let young athletes make their own decisions, and this particular problem is solved.

I attended Toronto for my MA and teach in a Canadian university, so…

Hawerchuk wrote: “The best Canadian university is the University of Toronto, which is probably on a par with the University of Michigan or maybe UCLA.”

If you want to make a meaningful comparison, you need to look at individual departments, not the entire school. So, say, English at Toronto or Law at McGill probably *are* equal in stature to a top-tier private university in the USA. (There’s a reason that Toronto, McGill, and British Columbia are referred to, sincerely, as ‘the Canadian Ivy League’.)

And it should be noted that the previously quoted student-faculty ratios are a bit misleading. The numbers are skewed, for instance, by Toronto’s satellite campuses, which (outside of a few programs) are generally second-tier programs run by mostly contract-faculty with much larger class sizes. So if we insist on the comparison to the American public university system, the St. George campus is to U Toronto as Berkeley is to U California.

It’s too bad that study doesn’t include private school data. The costs incurred in student aid, as well as the revenue generated through alumni, would be far different than what you’d see in public schools.

J-Doug/36 wrote: “so a good number of schools turn a profit, or at least we can say a good number of public schools turned a profit five years ago”

A friend of mine teaches in English at Rutgers. The football team, he’s told me, is known to lose millions of dollars a year - money that ends up being siphoned from academic departments. So he was stunned when he learned that their unprofitable team was getting a swanky update for their stadium.

But 12 months ago, he learned where at least a tiny bit of the money came from. The school informed its departments that they would stop supplying instructors with chalk. No chalk. For a school.

$100 million stadium update -> no chalk.

@J-Doug - I’m not in total disagreement with you, I think you’ve definitely identified one of the problems.  I’d add one more biggie, though - that college football and basketball have essentially already won market share as the professional feeder league.  Huge barriers to entry for a new organization if it wanted to compete, so that’s another issue keeping down freedom of choice.

Overall, I really think the entire notion of college sports needs to be evaluated.  I’m not sure the current form makes much sense.  I see no reason colleges can’t provide the professional feeder league, I just don’t see how the current system is doing anything but taking advantage of revenue generating kids (at least in football and basketball, other sports are a whole different story since as you point out, athletic departments aren’t turning profits).

The history, of course, is not irrelevant.  Professional football exists because big time college football (including those famous football factories at Yale, Harvard and Princeton) was so popular.  Unlike baseball, which grew from amateur competition into professional quite early and well before regular organized intercollegiate sports were popular (and being played in the summer, never matched the school year), professional football and to a lesser, but not inconsiderable extent, basketball grew in popularity out of the need for a player like Jim Thorpe, Red Grange or Hank Luisetti to have a showcase for their skills after they graduated. 

I personally disagree with the U19 rule in college basketball, because I don’t think it’s good for the NBA or the NCAA.  The “one and done” players change the recruiting landscape, putting a coach of a prominent program into constant rebuilding mode (witness Kentucky losing all five starters at once), which increases the likelihood of recruiting violations.  The NBA loses a year of non-students, who go to Europe or Israel, for no good reason. 

The NFL’s rule (as shown in the Maurice Clarett and Mike Williams cases) makes a bit more sense.  The physical maturity issue is more acute and frankly the NFL gets a great deal with a free development league that also creates free promotion for future stars.  No one attends NBA Development League games and competing with college football with a pro league for U22 or whatever would be a losing economic proposition.

There really are advantages to getting that education.  Brandon Roy took a shot at the draft after high school but clearly wasn’t ready.  The raw, selfish kid was turned by his four years in college into a mature, polished leader.  Given that he wasn’t going to the NBA to start, I don’t think he gets that playing basketball full time in those same four years.

@Neil S - 37

I think it makes more sense to talk about the undergrad experience than it does to compare a handful of professional programs with deregulated tuition.

There is simply no comparison between the best public universities in the US and the best private universities in the US.  You may not get double the marginal value from spending twice as much per student at a private institution, but the outcomes (future employment prospects, not just learning) are simply better, even for the same student.  (And they have to be, otherwise we wouldn’t have people clamoring to attend top private universities - it’s not all marketing.)

Having attended and taught at UC Berkeley as well as a Canadian university, I can tell you that U of T (or any other Canadian school) is simply not a comparable institution.  The student body is drawn from a smaller pool, resulting in a lower caliber of student; the faculty is weaker; the school isn’t funded quite as generously.  Hence the comparison to Michigan or UCLA.

There’s nothing wrong with U of T being the 27th-best university in North America...We just shouldn’t overstate its place in the world.

There is simply no comparison between the best public universities in the US and the best private universities in the US.  You may not get double the marginal value from spending twice as much per student at a private institution, but the outcomes (future employment prospects, not just learning) are simply better, even for the same student.  (And they have to be, otherwise we wouldn’t have people clamoring to attend top private universities - it’s not all marketing.)

The latter point is not, as I understand it, really true.  There’s certainly a perception that it is, and there were studies done a number of years ago that showed that the average Harvard (to pick a school) grad makes a great deal more than the average state school grad.

However, later studies that compared Harvard grads to people who were accepted to, but unable to attend (finances forced them into the state school, for instance), a top private school found no difference in future earning.  That would seem to indicate that the difference is really in the selection process for those schools, rather than the teaching (or networking, for that matter) available there.

#43: I think the most commonly-cited research on the topic found otherwise:

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/03/what-does-the-dale-and-krueger-education-paper-really-say.html

“Based on the straightforward regression results in column 1, men who attend the most competitive colleges [according to Barron’s 1982 ratings] earn 23 percent more than men who attend very competitive colleges, other variables in the equation being equal. “