By Amanda Grannis
An eight-month investigation has revealed startling news concerning student athletes and academic policies at UNC Chapel Hill. The rigorous investigation, which entailed interviewing 80 witnesses and reviewing 1.5 million emails, uncovered eighteen years worth of academic fraud within the state university’s academic programs for student athletes.
The university’s fake “paper classes” are the centerpiece of the scandal. Allegedly, faculty members that taught “paper classes” were instructed to keep student athletes’ grades high enough to meet the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s (NCAA) academic requirements. The investigation revealed that on a continuous and systematic level, instructors artificially inflated student athletes’ GPA by giving students A’s and B’s, regardless of the content of their work, and even wrote papers on students’ behalves.
College athletic programs, particularly football and basketball, tend to be great sources of revenue for universities. In 2013, UNC Chapel Hill gained $82, 792, 342 from its college sports teams. These earnings came from a variety of sources, including ticket sales and licensing rights.
That being said, UNC’s gross revenue from its college athletic teams is hardly all profit. In fact, in 2013, the university spent $82,735, 139 on its athletic programs, barely making it into the black with its resulting revenue. This reality is at stark contrast with the popular conception that college sports teams are pure “cash cows” for their respective schools.
Perhaps the fact that UNC barely broke even in 2013 makes it more fathomable why the university would endorse decade’s worth of systematic academic fraud. With so much of the school’s revenue invested in its athletic franchises, UNC has a strong interest in assuring that its athletic recruits remain eligible to play throughout the season.
With the stakes this high, it’s the student athletes themselves that may be paying the price. Beyond accepting a watered-down education (though many student athletes do receive full academic scholarships upon enrollment), many student athletes as a general matter have complained of their lack of medical coverage, concussion surveillance, and ability to pay for the daily expenses that come with an athletic career. In response to these difficulties, student athlete football players at Northwestern University even moved to form a union this year.
Perhaps the latest scandal in college sports world is just a symptom of a greater problem. The pressure to sustain successful and lucrative sports franchises falls heavily on the shoulders of both universities and student athletes. The academic fraud that UNC administrators perpetuated was likely just a corrupt strategy to win in the cutthroat game of college sports.
Links from this Article
http://abc11.com/education/unc-report-on-academic-fraud-to-be-released-wednesday/357874/
http://www.ncaa.org/remaining-eligible-academics
http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-26824892
http://www.usatoday.com/sports/college/schools/finances/
http://money.cnn.com/2014/04/23/pf/college/student-athlete-union-survey/