The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values [Paperback]

It is not often that a book can have as major an impact on a reader as this one has had on me -- and, I add, should have on everyone interested in education. It makes a compelling case that Division IA athletics is bad not only for a university's academic community but for the community at large as well. And it has led me to take this drastic action. I only hope that the university students, faculty and administration will have the wisdom to act favorably in response to this recommendation.

THE GAME OF LIFE is a myth destroyer. The authors bring to bear statistics gathered from 90,000 students at 30 colleges that are selective enough to have to turn away many well qualified applicants. "Every spring," the authors say, "valedictorians with straight A averages, and applicants with stellar SAT scores who may have conducted original laboratory research or made a full-length documentary film, are rejected because there are only so many spots in a class. Because there are so many outstanding candidates, a place in the entering class...is a scarce resource."

Basing their conclusions on a massive ten year quantitative research program that includes data collected in 1951, 1976 and 1989, these authors effectively destroy such accepted convictions as college sports programs pay for themselves, playing sports builds character, athletic contests encourage alumni support, and college sports play a major factor in the integration of underrepresented minorities into higher education. The authors brought to their task impeccable qualifications. Both are officers of the Andrew F. Mellon Foundation and Bowen is a former Princeton University president. Earlier they drew on the same resources for a widely respected study of race-sensitive college admissions called THE SHAPE OF THE RIVER.

Here are a few of their conclusions: Scholarship athletes not only arrive at college with poorer credentials (a 237 point SAT deficit in IA schools) but, despite their special tutoring programs and gut courses, they achieve even poorer records once on campus. It is rare for an athletic program to pay for itself even when the teams are winners. They site the University of Michigan where the teams did very well in 1998-1999 but the program lost $3.8 million. Their bottom line: "athletics is a bad business." College expenses for all other extracurricular activities represent a tiny fraction of those for athletics. Minorities are not well served by athletic programs. And, perhaps worst of all, the special entrance attention given to athletes has a strong negative effect on the attitudes of secondary school students.

Required reading for all concerned about the future of education.

All that is good stuff but the authors make it very hard to find that out. They write in a tepid prose, full of passive constructions and qualifications, that makes reading the book very slow going. Often it is like reading against a full-court press. Although Frank DeFord endorses the book, the authors should have read a lot of his work before starting on theirs. BTW, author William Bowen is the head of the Mellon Foundation and author James Shulman is a financial officer with the foundation--no wonder they write bureaucratic prose!

The ideas in the book are very important but many readers will be put off by the prose.

College football and basketball, in particular, are fully-subsidized minor leagues for the NFL and NBA. If the NCAA drastically changes the way it does business, those leagues will have to find another way to test and screen athletes. This won't hurt the schools at all; in fact, the schools will benefit. Good student/athletes will still get a college education (as many baseball players do today), and pure athletes will still have a chance to compete and become professionals.

This book substantially helped shape my opinions on college sports in a well-researched and documented manner.

I recommend this book for anyone who wants a balanced yet critical look into college athletics. jgalt5@yahoo.com