Luebchow's Journey: From College Sports Fan to Critic

I've been a huge fan of college sports for as long as I can remember. If I had to pick my all-time favorite activity for a Saturday afternoon, it would be attending a college football or basketball game. But in recent years, I started to realize that college athletics is not exactly the idealized extracurricular activity of talented students that I had imagined as a child.

When I entered the higher education policy world as a writer for Higher Ed Watch two years ago, I wanted to learn more. What I found was not pretty, and I was soon struggling to figure out how college sports had lost its way, and how policymakers could steer it back in the right direction.

Now, my time on the sports beat at Higher Ed Watch is drawing to a close. Before departing the higher education blog world, I wanted to revisit my recommendations for reforming college athletics. I understand that change will not come quickly or easily, but I do believe that demanding greater accountability from colleges for the academic performance of their athletes could significantly improve the way sports programs currently do business.

My Changing View of College Sports

When I set out to investigate the nexus between college athletics and academics, I quickly found myself immersed in appalling graduation rates and stories of academic corruption. It wasn't difficult to lay bare the dirty, profit-driven side of the college athletics world. But as visible as the problems were, few people seemed to care. Outside of isolated exposés and a few dedicated professors, there weren't very many serious efforts at reform.

I sincerely believe that athletics can make important contributions to the higher education experience, and that many athletes are genuine students who learn and grow from participating in sports. I also believe that athletic teams produce valuable feelings of community and pride for an entire institution. But the commercialization of college sports, spurred specifically by the popularity of college basketball and football, has taken big-time athletic programs so far afield from their original mission that they have lost touch with what really matters in higher education: graduating students with meaningful degrees.

While looking for solutions to steer college athletics back in the right direction, I quickly came to the conclusion that we cannot rely on colleges to change their ways. There is too much money and celebrity at stake. Concerned students and faculty members just don't have enough clout to take on the powerful forces on their campuses that benefit from having big-time sports programs.

Reform, if it's going to happen at all, must be instigated from the outside, by either the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) or Congress, the two entities that have the most power to drive change in the college sports world.

Developing Solutions

Ideally, the NCAA would take the lead in demanding changes because it has the ability to enact detailed rules and regulations and rescind participation rights of its member colleges if those requirements are not met. The NCAA's decision-making bodies, however, are made up of representatives from its member schools. As a result, reforms that restrict school-level management are typically not high on the organization's to-do list.

If self-regulation doesn't work, then Congress may have to take action to force the NCAA and its member institutions to make sure that colleges are not exploiting their athletes for financial gain. Congress has the authority to oversee college sports because athletic programs, like most of the rest of higher education, are tax-exempt. Lawmakers can demand that athletic programs prove that they deserve their tax-exempt status, by requiring them to be more transparent about their budgets and about the academic performance of their athletes. With better data in hand, Congress can evaluate whether further action is needed to reform the programs.

I would love to see the NCAA ramp up its oversight of college sports before Congress has to step in. But I've heard a lot of promises from the NCAA, and a lot of rhetoric about change and not seen much happen. I know that it won't be easy to turn the college sports world back from its trek toward professionalization. However, I harbor hope that athletics and higher education can once again become compatible partners in the academic growth of student-athletes.

In the coming weeks, I will lay out my recommendations for how Congress and the NCAA can get this process underway. Stay tuned.