So last weekend I was in the mood to write about college sports, and my wish that schools would stop dishonestly running minor league football and basketball teams. And today the Tribune has an article about obscure sports being a venue to scholarships for women to chose to specialize in them, “Women make college gains with low-profile sports.”
College sports are booming, thanks to gargantuan TV contracts and the increasing use of athletics as a marketing tool, and women’s teams are enjoying much of the bounty. NCAA statistics for 2011-12 show they are chipping away at the scholarship gap after decades of inequality, with much of the growth coming in sports that barely dent the public consciousness.
The premise of the article is that, unlike men’s sports, the scholarships for women’s sports are spread across a diverse range of teams, so that women have the chance to gain scholarships by choosing less common sports to specialize in.
The article provides a table with “odds” of getting scholarships, dividing the number of high school athletes by the number of scholarships available to produce the metric of “athletes per scholarship” — a faulty metric because in many of these sports, kids compete in ways other than high school teams, making the “odds” seem better than is truly the case. According to this table, the large majority of the sports with the best “odds” are women’s sports, but many of these are (a) sports that require money to pursue and (b) sports where the competition is generally in clubs rather than high school teams. For instance:
Women’s equestrian: 3 athletes per scholarship (no men’s category listed) = 477 scholarships
Women’s rowing: 3 (no men’s category listed) = 2,087 scholarships
Women’s fencing: 16 (29 for men) = 110 scholarships for women, 66 for men
Women’s rifle: 14 (125 for men) = 70 scholarships for women, 16 for men
Articles like this one, which continues by profiling girls/women who have won such scholarships, continue to promote the idea that the ticket to a college scholarship is athletics. Sometimes such an article does point out that parents pursuing scholarships for their children can spend far more in expenses on the chosen sport than the value of any potential scholarship, but it still takes it for granted that this is an appropriate thing for colleges to do.
When are we going to start questioning this premise? When are we going to say that college are about academics, and not having a winning [name the sport] team? I’ve got four more years until I’m faced with making the decision, with my son, on how much money my husband and I are willing to spend on his tuition bills, and what that means for his college choice. Can we please fix this before then?
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