Reclaiming the Game: College Sports and Educational Values (review)

Reclaiming the Game might have been called Trouble in Paradise. Given the scandals associated with big-time intercollegiate athletics, who would have imagined that academically selective institutions also place college sports high on their list of headaches? This book is not about the Southeastern Conference or the Big Ten. Its focus is on athletics gone awry in the Ivy League, the New England Small College Athletics Conference, and the University Athletic Association. William Bowen and Sarah Levin are the right persons to lead this exploration. Bowen, having been President of Princeton, has the campus experience to speak to the issue. And, as an economist and President of the Mellon Foundation, he draws on systematic data to analyze questions about how students who play varsity sports fare in the college classroom. Levin, an All-American and captain of the varsity sailing team who concentrated in mathematics as an undergraduate at Harvard, shows by example that excellence in academics and athletics can be compatible. Now a Ph.D. candidate in Epidemiology at Harvard's School of Public Health, she brings strong statistical skills plus contemporary insights as a student-athlete to the Mellon study.

None of the colleges in the study offer athletics scholarships. So, what is the problem? Keen competition for entrance to these academically prestigious institutions means that admissions slots often are allocated to campus interest groups — ranging from performing arts to journalism. And, varsity athletics are central to this clamor for coveted spaces. A large state university with an enrollment of 25,000 can better absorb 800 recruited student-athletes than can an Amherst College or a Brown University whose total undergraduate enrollments range from about 1,700 to 6,000. The situation is exacerbated by the commitment these selective colleges have made by offering a large number of varsity sports. Harvard, for example, offers the most varsity sports (39) in NCAA Division I. This contrasts with the University of Georgia, whose program consists of 16 teams. The stakes are high because in the Ivy League and the New England colleges, the percentage of undergraduates who are recruited for athletic ability ranges from about 20% to 33% of an entering class. Thirty years ago sociologists Burton Clark and Martin Trow presented a typology of student subcultures to gauge the relative strength of such groups as pre-meds, musicians, radicals, fraternities, and athletes in the campus. Using their approach, it's fair to say that recruited athletes exert great influence on the composition and tenor of student life at institutions who belong to the Ivy League or to NESCAC.

The simmering concern by some presidents and faculty is that the student-athletes behave as athlete-students. Bowen and Levin point out some overlapping trends: students who were recruited for athletics underachieve in their college grade point average on predictors for their own college performance. And, they under-achieve when viewed against their fellow classmates. This Double Trouble escalates to a Triple Whammy with the finding that underachieving athletes tend to major in the social sciences—not a bright prospect for scholars in these fields.

Most colleges would love to have the problems the Ivy Group and the NESCAC face. Paining over whether to admit a linebacker with an SAT of 550 verbal and 600 quantitative scores seems easy if you are dean of admissions at a football factory where in a good year the combined SAT scores for the entire defensive line may reach 1150. But the problems are relative to the academic orbit in which one plays—and studies and teaches.

The athletics muddle in the Ivy League and NESCAC is not wholly surprising since emphasis on athletics in admissions is a situation of the college's own making. At some time presidents or deans assented to the proposition that varsity squads ought to be filled with students who were accomplished players. In other words, it could not be left to chance. Specialization is...