The President of Williams College faces a firestorm for not allowing the
women's lacrosse team to postpone exams to attend the playoffs. The
University of Michigan loses $2.8 million on athletics despite averaging
110,000 fans at each home football game. Schools across the country
struggle with the tradeoffs involved with recruiting athletes and
updating facilities for dozens of varsity sports. Does increasing
intensification of college sports support or detract from higher
education's core mission?
James Shulman and William Bowen introduce facts into a terrain overrun
by emotions and enduring myths. Using the same database that informed
The Shape of the River, the authors analyze data on 90,000 students
who attended thirty selective colleges and universities in the 1950s,
1970s, and 1990s. Drawing also on historical research and new
information on giving and spending, the authors demonstrate how
athletics influence the class composition and campus ethos of selective
schools, as well as the messages that these institutions send to
prospective students, their parents, and society at large.
Shulman and Bowen show that athletic programs raise even more difficult
questions of educational policy for small private colleges and highly
selective universities than they do for big-time scholarship-granting
schools. They discover that today's athletes, more so than their
predecessors, enter college less academically well-prepared and with
different goals and values than their classmates--differences that lead
to different lives. They reveal that gender equity efforts have wrought
large, sometimes unanticipated changes. And they show that the alumni
appetite for winning teams is not--as schools often assume--insatiable.
If a culprit emerges, it is the unquestioned spread of a changed
athletic culture through the emulation of highly publicized teams by
low-profile sports, of men's programs by women's, and of athletic
powerhouses by small colleges.
Shulman and Bowen celebrate the benefits of collegiate sports, while
identifying the subtle ways in which athletic intensification can pull
even prestigious institutions from their missions. By examining how
athletes and other graduates view The Game of Life--and how colleges
shape society's view of what its rules should be--Bowen and Shulman go
far beyond sports. They tell us about higher education today: the ways
in which colleges set policies, reinforce or neglect their core mission,
and send signals about what matters.
