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Controversial Thesis
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this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2024
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Yes, but that opportunity should be granted based on economic need and a demonstrated ability to work hard, not based on athletic ability, because athletic ability is unrelated to your ability to study economics or physics or philosophy.
good thing economic and academic scholarships also exist. there's an absolutely tiny number of athletic scholarships and athletes compared to the total student body in every single university. removing the athletic scholarships and athletes will only hurt the athletes and not help anyone else.
There's the context of opportunity cost. If you use money to give an athletic scholarship, you can't use this money for something else. Hence, if the athletic scholarships were replaced by other types of scholarships, it would help those others.
yeah thanks for the condescending lesson on opportunity cost, i totally didn't indirectly address that with the population discrepency between athletics and total student body.
Just my personal experience, but I've found that the ability to work hard and push through doing things you don't want to do is very much transferable between sports and academics.
Yes, and those scholarships should be given to those who have proven that they do work hard on academics.
It completely excludes a lot of people with physical disabilities or health problems though. I promise you that the kid with a chronic health condition that has them in and out of the hospital while they're getting through school is a harder worker than the captain of the football team that's just maintaining their GPA to stay on the team.
Edit: Also, it's sexist as hell. The best scholarships are for men's sports and many women's sports don't get anywhere near the same support as men's sports, even in equivalent ones like soccer and basketball. There's no women's football league, and the women's leagues for other sports are abysmally supported.
Of course. It shouldn't be the sole criterion for selecting students. But if it does reflect your academic potential, then I don't see why it can't be one of the criteria for a subset of students. Everyone has different ways of expressing their abilities and different limitations. There's no known single metric that can accurately capture that for everyone.
I think the bigger issue is the lack of scholarships for non-athletic activities. There are many other things that colleges and universities could give scholarships for that would foster a more diverse and inclusive student body, but the preferential treatment given to athletes actually impedes that through diversion of funds.
I was rather happy when my alma mater decided to use a pile of alumni association money to build a massive LAN center and start pro e-sports teams instead of starting a football program. The e-sports program will give scholarships not just for the gamers, but also for theater kids that become shoutcaster personalities, and they use the LAN center as a way to beta test the games coming out of the game development programs. They really emphasize the educational aspect of it as well and push the gamers to get involved in game design or creative writing majors/minors so that their scholarship activity can actually benefit their career after school. It does help that the school is down the road from Acti-Blizz, so internships are plentiful.
There are other ways for the schools to support potentially profitable student activities that don't exclude people unable to participate in sports.