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The William G. Bowen Series
The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values
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 the ways in which colleges set policies, reinforce or neglect their core mission, and send signals about what matters.
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 the ways in which colleges set policies, reinforce or neglect their core mission, and send signals about what matters.
496 pages, Paperback
First published November 27, 2000
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July 23, 2021
Though a bit dated, this is an essential book for understanding college sports. The authors analyze datasets of colleges and universities from the 50s, 70s, and 80s to get a sense of the impact, costs, and benefits of college sports on college and beyond. Though they don’t go beyond the late 80s/early 90s in their data, much of what they find is still relevant today, probably more so. There is little reason to think that the trends they see in the data would have reversed.
Their focus is on selective colleges and universities. They compare data from Division 1A, both public and private, institutions, Ivy League schools, and coed liberal arts colleges. They look across the spectrum of sports: not just football and men’s basketball. The first several chapters focus on men’s athletics and then they shift to women’s athletics. They look at admissions, academic outcomes, and impacts on later careers and earnings. They also examine how participation in athletics affects the kind of leadership roles students take on as well as the impact on charity and public service. Their analysis ends with a look at the financial costs of athletic programs. They close the book with a discussion of “propositions” that the authors hope might guide reform attempts.
There are many interesting findings. Some not at all surprising: academic outcomes for most athletes is worse than the average student at their respective institutions; almost no athletics program is profitable. Others are more surprising (at least to me). For example, one of the things they trace through the data is that as women’s athletics, in particular basketball and softball, become bigger (more money, more recruiting, etc), they start to mirror their male counterparts in terms of outcomes and impacts (for good and ill). In retrospect, it’s kind of obvious that this would be the case, but seeing the data that, for example, as recruitment of women athletes intensifies, the academic outcomes start to look more and more like the outcomes of recruited male athletes was eye-opening nonetheless.
For the most part, the book is straightforwardly empirical. The authors present and discuss the data (There is an appendix of 30-40 pages that summaries the key points of the data). There’s little pontification, judgment making, or self-righteous criticism. It’s a serious attempt to bring together data to better understand the history and state of college athletics. It is really only in the last chapter that the authors share how they judge the state of things and where they think it ought to go. They self-consciously do not offer a “blueprint,” but they present nine propositions (which are more like aspirations) to guide reform. Personally, I do not think most of these are workable given the considerable impediments to reform that the authors themselves discuss.
The biggest takeaway, I suppose, of the book is that college athletics and the rest of the university are increasingly diverging. The authors see an important role for athletics as part of the overall mission and purpose of the university, and want to find ways to bridge this gap. However, the data they present doesn’t show a way to do anything about this widening gyre.
Their focus is on selective colleges and universities. They compare data from Division 1A, both public and private, institutions, Ivy League schools, and coed liberal arts colleges. They look across the spectrum of sports: not just football and men’s basketball. The first several chapters focus on men’s athletics and then they shift to women’s athletics. They look at admissions, academic outcomes, and impacts on later careers and earnings. They also examine how participation in athletics affects the kind of leadership roles students take on as well as the impact on charity and public service. Their analysis ends with a look at the financial costs of athletic programs. They close the book with a discussion of “propositions” that the authors hope might guide reform attempts.
There are many interesting findings. Some not at all surprising: academic outcomes for most athletes is worse than the average student at their respective institutions; almost no athletics program is profitable. Others are more surprising (at least to me). For example, one of the things they trace through the data is that as women’s athletics, in particular basketball and softball, become bigger (more money, more recruiting, etc), they start to mirror their male counterparts in terms of outcomes and impacts (for good and ill). In retrospect, it’s kind of obvious that this would be the case, but seeing the data that, for example, as recruitment of women athletes intensifies, the academic outcomes start to look more and more like the outcomes of recruited male athletes was eye-opening nonetheless.
For the most part, the book is straightforwardly empirical. The authors present and discuss the data (There is an appendix of 30-40 pages that summaries the key points of the data). There’s little pontification, judgment making, or self-righteous criticism. It’s a serious attempt to bring together data to better understand the history and state of college athletics. It is really only in the last chapter that the authors share how they judge the state of things and where they think it ought to go. They self-consciously do not offer a “blueprint,” but they present nine propositions (which are more like aspirations) to guide reform. Personally, I do not think most of these are workable given the considerable impediments to reform that the authors themselves discuss.
The biggest takeaway, I suppose, of the book is that college athletics and the rest of the university are increasingly diverging. The authors see an important role for athletics as part of the overall mission and purpose of the university, and want to find ways to bridge this gap. However, the data they present doesn’t show a way to do anything about this widening gyre.
July 26, 2020
Excellent, daunting, myth-exploding book.
500 pages, 177,000 words. A taxing read but written in a plain, direct prose style. The authors have something interesting to report on every page, in nearly every paragraph.
This book is ostensibly about college sports but it left me with a disheartened view of the higher-ed industrial complex, and of how that industry has morphed over the last 50+ years. This book practically predicted the inevitability of the recently revealed college-admissions bribery scandal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_co...
I was spurred to read this book after reading Louis Menand's 4,000-word rave review in The New Yorker (Jan. 22, 2001), which unfortunately is behind a paywall.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...
Here are excerpts from Menand's review:
Shulman and Bowen are foundation officers by occupation . . . and statisticians by inclination. They are the sort of people who think that no observation is so intuitive that it can't be improved by a regression analysis. The Game of Life contains almost two hundred charts and tables, and its prose is cautious, methodical, and somewhat repetitive. But it may be one of the most important books on higher education published in the last twenty years. It is certainly one of the most interesting.
[The authors] gathered comprehensive information about the entering classes of 1951, 1976, and 1989 at thirty-two institutions: four large public universities, including Michigan and North Carolina; four Ivy League schools; nine other private universities, including Tulane and Stanford; seven coed liberal-arts colleges, including Swarthmore and Williams; four all-women's colleges; and four historically black colleges.
In 1998, Bowen and Derek Bok, the former president of Harvard, used [the same database that undergirds The Game of Life] to produce The Shape of the River, a study of affirmative action in college admissions, which provided empirical support for the claim that the benefits of affirmative action (such as the professional advancement of non-whites) outweigh the costs (such as the disadvantaging of white applicants). The Game of Life is drawn from the same database, and although affirmative action is barely mentioned in its pages, it is a kind of companion to the earlier book [The Shape of the River].
in 1997-98 (the most recent year for which complete enrollment data are available) there were six hundred and sixty-six varsity athletes enrolled at the University of Michigan and seven hundred and fifteen enrolled at Williams—and Michigan is more than ten times as big. Thirty-six per cent of Williams students play intercollegiate sports and only three per cent of Michigan's do. Princeton has nine hundred and forty-two athletes, half again as many as Michigan.
For many years, the Harvard-Yale game was what the Super Bowl is now—a national event for football fans. There was college football long before there was professional football.
The reason Princeton has half again as many varsity athletes as Michigan is that Princeton competes in half again as many sports: Princeton fields teams in thirty-one sports, Michigan in twenty-one.
Twenty-seven per cent of Ivy League students are athletes today; twenty per cent were athletes in 1951. What has changed is the relation of the athletes to the rest of the student body. In 1951, the academic profile of a varsity wrestler or swimmer at a place like Princeton or Williams was indistinguishable from the academic profile of his non-athletic classmates. By 1989, the varsity athlete at every type of school except all-women's colleges was highly distinguishable from the rest of the class—not only in terms of academic aptitude and achievement but in terms of values and interests as well.
. . . the S.A.T. scores of the typical varsity tennis player at a coed liberal-arts college are also much lower—a hundred and forty-three points lower—than his [non-athlete] classmates'.
Today, all college sports—not just sports like football, basketball, and hockey . . . —are played by students who have been recruited specifically to play them. In 1951, the Princeton squash player was an academically qualified man who happened to enjoy competitive squash. He was a sports "walk-on": he simply showed up for tryouts one day and made the team. Now there are almost no varsity-sports walk-ons....
[In 1999] Among men, if you were black you had an eighteen-percent better chance of getting into this college than a white student with the same S.A.T. scores had. If you were what is known in admissions talk as a "legacy"—that is, the child of an alumnus—you had a twenty-five-percent better chance. But if you were an athlete you had a forty-eight-percent better chance. If you were a female athlete, your advantage was fifty-three percent.
. . . virtually no college in the country makes money from football, no matter how successful its team. In 1998-99, the University of Michigan's football team had an average home attendance of 110,965 (a national record) and won the Citrus Bowl; the men's hockey team made it to the second round of the N.C.A.A. tournament, which it had won the year before; the men's gymnastics team won the national championship; and at the end of the year the athletic department had a $3.8-million shortfall. Still, for a school like Michigan or North Carolina, state pride is at stake. What is at stake for Stanford or Swarthmore? Why should colleges like those set aside slots for golfers, oarsmen, and badminton players in their entering classes? Michigan can make room for a hundred and fifty athletes in each class and still have more than five thousand places left. At Williams, which admits about five hundred students a year, more than a third of the places are taken by athletes.
It is not the case that having winning teams increases alumni giving; or that recruiting athletes enhances the racial or socioeconomic diversity of the student body
Since virtually every nonprofit college and university in the country is dependent on some form of federal aid, there is no escape from Title IX.
The Game of Life intends to make the case against intercollegiate athletics on their present scale, and readers not personally invested in college sports are likely to feel that it succeeds. Whether there are enough of these readers to lead to a change in policy is another matter. Shulman and Bowen are not optimistic,....
What's fascinating about The Game of Life, though, isn't the shadow it casts on college sports. It's the light it sheds, almost inadvertently, on college in general. Nearly everything Shulman and Bowen say about students who are athletes has implications for the way we think about students who are not. Many people believe, for example, that athletic virtues translate into social virtues. Shulman and Bowen are fairly certain that the main thing athletes carry off the playing field and into life after college is the belief that competition is good, which, as they point out, is not the belief a liberal-arts education was designed to inculcate.
One of the ways that Shulman and Bowen try to determine whether playing college sports makes people "better" is to distinguish between what they call "selection effects" and "treatment effects." They conclude that college athletes have the personal traits they do because they have consistently been selected—by admissions offices, by high-school coaches, and by the grownups who first encouraged them to play a sport—precisely for those traits. College athletes do not have team spirit because they play team sports, in other words; they play team sports because they have team spirit. There seems to be no evidence that actually playing the sport enhances the qualities athletes already have when they arrive on campus. Shulman and Bowen also find that the preference of male athletes for careers in business-related fields is present even before they start college, and that four years of liberal-arts education typically does little to change their goals or values. What Shulman and Bowen don't say, since it is not within the purview of their study, is just what "treatment effects" college has on anybody. Does a liberal-arts education make people more imaginative, open-minded, and humane, or is it that imaginative, open-minded, and humane people are the kind of people selected to receive a liberal-arts education? If the liberal arts genuinely liberalize, maybe there would be a greater social benefit if colleges recruited a class of bigots and highly intelligent dogmatists.
Today's athletes consistently outperform yesterday's in both professional and amateur sports. This, Shulman and Bowen believe, is the result of specialization. Athletes train more intensively, from an earlier age, to perform a particular task. People decide to become a goalie or a breaststroker when they are still in grade school, and they spend years developing a high level of expertise in that one small area of human endeavor.
. . . if you support a wrestling team you have to come up with at least one person in each weight class every four years.
. . . what is true of college athletes today is also true of college students generally. The admissions-office ideal used to be the all-around achiever—the Princeton squash player of 1951. Now the ideal is the gifted specialist. ... Instead of the well-rounded student, Shulman and Bowen explain, admissions offices now seek the well-rounded class.
In The Shape of the River, Bowen and Bok estimated that in 1976, at the twenty-eight predominately white schools in the Mellon database, a total of seven hundred black students were admitted who would probably have been rejected in a race-neutral admissions process. According to The Game of Life, in the same year twenty-four of those schools (leaving out the all-women's colleges) admitted approximately twenty-six hundred athletes. The male athletes' S.A.T. scores were, on average, ninety-four points lower than their classmates'. In 1989, those colleges admitted approximately thirty-three hundred athletes; the S.A.T. scores of the men averaged a hundred and eighteen points lower.
Many articles and books have been written to explain why admissions policies that take race into account are pernicious and ought to be abandoned. The University of California is now required by law not to use race as a criterion in admissions. That black Americans have historically been denied access to higher education is indisputable. That affirmative-action policies at élite colleges and universities have increased the number of black Americans in the higher-status professions is established by Bowen and Bok's book. By 1992, of the seven hundred black students who had entered selective colleges under affirmative-action criteria sixteen years earlier, seventy were doctors, roughly sixty were lawyers, a hundred and twenty-five were business executives, and more than three hundred had become civic leaders. How many crusaders against affirmative action in college admissions will now speak out against the preferential treatment of athletes?
500 pages, 177,000 words. A taxing read but written in a plain, direct prose style. The authors have something interesting to report on every page, in nearly every paragraph.
This book is ostensibly about college sports but it left me with a disheartened view of the higher-ed industrial complex, and of how that industry has morphed over the last 50+ years. This book practically predicted the inevitability of the recently revealed college-admissions bribery scandal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_co...
I was spurred to read this book after reading Louis Menand's 4,000-word rave review in The New Yorker (Jan. 22, 2001), which unfortunately is behind a paywall.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...
Here are excerpts from Menand's review:
Shulman and Bowen are foundation officers by occupation . . . and statisticians by inclination. They are the sort of people who think that no observation is so intuitive that it can't be improved by a regression analysis. The Game of Life contains almost two hundred charts and tables, and its prose is cautious, methodical, and somewhat repetitive. But it may be one of the most important books on higher education published in the last twenty years. It is certainly one of the most interesting.
[The authors] gathered comprehensive information about the entering classes of 1951, 1976, and 1989 at thirty-two institutions: four large public universities, including Michigan and North Carolina; four Ivy League schools; nine other private universities, including Tulane and Stanford; seven coed liberal-arts colleges, including Swarthmore and Williams; four all-women's colleges; and four historically black colleges.
In 1998, Bowen and Derek Bok, the former president of Harvard, used [the same database that undergirds The Game of Life] to produce The Shape of the River, a study of affirmative action in college admissions, which provided empirical support for the claim that the benefits of affirmative action (such as the professional advancement of non-whites) outweigh the costs (such as the disadvantaging of white applicants). The Game of Life is drawn from the same database, and although affirmative action is barely mentioned in its pages, it is a kind of companion to the earlier book [The Shape of the River].
in 1997-98 (the most recent year for which complete enrollment data are available) there were six hundred and sixty-six varsity athletes enrolled at the University of Michigan and seven hundred and fifteen enrolled at Williams—and Michigan is more than ten times as big. Thirty-six per cent of Williams students play intercollegiate sports and only three per cent of Michigan's do. Princeton has nine hundred and forty-two athletes, half again as many as Michigan.
For many years, the Harvard-Yale game was what the Super Bowl is now—a national event for football fans. There was college football long before there was professional football.
The reason Princeton has half again as many varsity athletes as Michigan is that Princeton competes in half again as many sports: Princeton fields teams in thirty-one sports, Michigan in twenty-one.
Twenty-seven per cent of Ivy League students are athletes today; twenty per cent were athletes in 1951. What has changed is the relation of the athletes to the rest of the student body. In 1951, the academic profile of a varsity wrestler or swimmer at a place like Princeton or Williams was indistinguishable from the academic profile of his non-athletic classmates. By 1989, the varsity athlete at every type of school except all-women's colleges was highly distinguishable from the rest of the class—not only in terms of academic aptitude and achievement but in terms of values and interests as well.
. . . the S.A.T. scores of the typical varsity tennis player at a coed liberal-arts college are also much lower—a hundred and forty-three points lower—than his [non-athlete] classmates'.
Today, all college sports—not just sports like football, basketball, and hockey . . . —are played by students who have been recruited specifically to play them. In 1951, the Princeton squash player was an academically qualified man who happened to enjoy competitive squash. He was a sports "walk-on": he simply showed up for tryouts one day and made the team. Now there are almost no varsity-sports walk-ons....
[In 1999] Among men, if you were black you had an eighteen-percent better chance of getting into this college than a white student with the same S.A.T. scores had. If you were what is known in admissions talk as a "legacy"—that is, the child of an alumnus—you had a twenty-five-percent better chance. But if you were an athlete you had a forty-eight-percent better chance. If you were a female athlete, your advantage was fifty-three percent.
. . . virtually no college in the country makes money from football, no matter how successful its team. In 1998-99, the University of Michigan's football team had an average home attendance of 110,965 (a national record) and won the Citrus Bowl; the men's hockey team made it to the second round of the N.C.A.A. tournament, which it had won the year before; the men's gymnastics team won the national championship; and at the end of the year the athletic department had a $3.8-million shortfall. Still, for a school like Michigan or North Carolina, state pride is at stake. What is at stake for Stanford or Swarthmore? Why should colleges like those set aside slots for golfers, oarsmen, and badminton players in their entering classes? Michigan can make room for a hundred and fifty athletes in each class and still have more than five thousand places left. At Williams, which admits about five hundred students a year, more than a third of the places are taken by athletes.
It is not the case that having winning teams increases alumni giving; or that recruiting athletes enhances the racial or socioeconomic diversity of the student body
Since virtually every nonprofit college and university in the country is dependent on some form of federal aid, there is no escape from Title IX.
The Game of Life intends to make the case against intercollegiate athletics on their present scale, and readers not personally invested in college sports are likely to feel that it succeeds. Whether there are enough of these readers to lead to a change in policy is another matter. Shulman and Bowen are not optimistic,....
What's fascinating about The Game of Life, though, isn't the shadow it casts on college sports. It's the light it sheds, almost inadvertently, on college in general. Nearly everything Shulman and Bowen say about students who are athletes has implications for the way we think about students who are not. Many people believe, for example, that athletic virtues translate into social virtues. Shulman and Bowen are fairly certain that the main thing athletes carry off the playing field and into life after college is the belief that competition is good, which, as they point out, is not the belief a liberal-arts education was designed to inculcate.
One of the ways that Shulman and Bowen try to determine whether playing college sports makes people "better" is to distinguish between what they call "selection effects" and "treatment effects." They conclude that college athletes have the personal traits they do because they have consistently been selected—by admissions offices, by high-school coaches, and by the grownups who first encouraged them to play a sport—precisely for those traits. College athletes do not have team spirit because they play team sports, in other words; they play team sports because they have team spirit. There seems to be no evidence that actually playing the sport enhances the qualities athletes already have when they arrive on campus. Shulman and Bowen also find that the preference of male athletes for careers in business-related fields is present even before they start college, and that four years of liberal-arts education typically does little to change their goals or values. What Shulman and Bowen don't say, since it is not within the purview of their study, is just what "treatment effects" college has on anybody. Does a liberal-arts education make people more imaginative, open-minded, and humane, or is it that imaginative, open-minded, and humane people are the kind of people selected to receive a liberal-arts education? If the liberal arts genuinely liberalize, maybe there would be a greater social benefit if colleges recruited a class of bigots and highly intelligent dogmatists.
Today's athletes consistently outperform yesterday's in both professional and amateur sports. This, Shulman and Bowen believe, is the result of specialization. Athletes train more intensively, from an earlier age, to perform a particular task. People decide to become a goalie or a breaststroker when they are still in grade school, and they spend years developing a high level of expertise in that one small area of human endeavor.
. . . if you support a wrestling team you have to come up with at least one person in each weight class every four years.
. . . what is true of college athletes today is also true of college students generally. The admissions-office ideal used to be the all-around achiever—the Princeton squash player of 1951. Now the ideal is the gifted specialist. ... Instead of the well-rounded student, Shulman and Bowen explain, admissions offices now seek the well-rounded class.
In The Shape of the River, Bowen and Bok estimated that in 1976, at the twenty-eight predominately white schools in the Mellon database, a total of seven hundred black students were admitted who would probably have been rejected in a race-neutral admissions process. According to The Game of Life, in the same year twenty-four of those schools (leaving out the all-women's colleges) admitted approximately twenty-six hundred athletes. The male athletes' S.A.T. scores were, on average, ninety-four points lower than their classmates'. In 1989, those colleges admitted approximately thirty-three hundred athletes; the S.A.T. scores of the men averaged a hundred and eighteen points lower.
Many articles and books have been written to explain why admissions policies that take race into account are pernicious and ought to be abandoned. The University of California is now required by law not to use race as a criterion in admissions. That black Americans have historically been denied access to higher education is indisputable. That affirmative-action policies at élite colleges and universities have increased the number of black Americans in the higher-status professions is established by Bowen and Bok's book. By 1992, of the seven hundred black students who had entered selective colleges under affirmative-action criteria sixteen years earlier, seventy were doctors, roughly sixty were lawyers, a hundred and twenty-five were business executives, and more than three hundred had become civic leaders. How many crusaders against affirmative action in college admissions will now speak out against the preferential treatment of athletes?
January 13, 2024
A high-quality piece of quantitative social science, assessing the impact of participating in college athletics on the athletes themselves. Carefully distinguishes between D1, ivies, and liberal arts colleges; distinguishes between the experiences of “high profile“ sports and more run-of-the-mill ones, as well as between men and women; and assesses the impact, both in terms of performance while in college (graduation rates, grades), as well as Post-collegiate performance (professional outcomes, and earnings). It also assesses the issue, longitudinally, examining the 1951, 1976, and 1989 cohorts.
It does NOT attempt to assess the impact of college athletics on non-athletes or the institutions more broadly.
The broad results are interesting: while athletes do worse while on campus in terms of graduation rates and grades, in the long run, in terms of earnings in particular, they actually do better than non-athletes, even taking into account the fact that athletes seem generally inclined to pursue more lucrative careers in the first place. Women athletes, in fact seem to outperform non-athletes. The book is quite rigorous in trying to assess whether the performance outcomes are a result of pre-existing character traits or capacities that the student athletes have before they arrive on campus, what happens to them while they are on campus. For example, it looks at the outcomes for people who played high school athletics, only versus people who played collegiate athletics, and tries to ask, although it doesn’t come to any firm conclusions, what the reasons might be for these different performance outcomes
It turns out that most of the serious problems are really associated with the high profile men’s D1 sports (e.g. football and basketball) — this is where the graduation rates and the grades are the worst, and where they had significantly worsened over the course of the late 20th century. But in this respect it is also important to note that this is a book that has had a tangible impact: since it was published in 2001, and in response to its findings, most D1 schools have made a concerted effort to improve graduation rates and mentorship for student athletes, and by the late 2010s, even the campus performance of athletes now tends to be almost as good as for non-athletes (who don’t get such special attentions) while the long-term outcomes continue to be good.
It does NOT attempt to assess the impact of college athletics on non-athletes or the institutions more broadly.
The broad results are interesting: while athletes do worse while on campus in terms of graduation rates and grades, in the long run, in terms of earnings in particular, they actually do better than non-athletes, even taking into account the fact that athletes seem generally inclined to pursue more lucrative careers in the first place. Women athletes, in fact seem to outperform non-athletes. The book is quite rigorous in trying to assess whether the performance outcomes are a result of pre-existing character traits or capacities that the student athletes have before they arrive on campus, what happens to them while they are on campus. For example, it looks at the outcomes for people who played high school athletics, only versus people who played collegiate athletics, and tries to ask, although it doesn’t come to any firm conclusions, what the reasons might be for these different performance outcomes
It turns out that most of the serious problems are really associated with the high profile men’s D1 sports (e.g. football and basketball) — this is where the graduation rates and the grades are the worst, and where they had significantly worsened over the course of the late 20th century. But in this respect it is also important to note that this is a book that has had a tangible impact: since it was published in 2001, and in response to its findings, most D1 schools have made a concerted effort to improve graduation rates and mentorship for student athletes, and by the late 2010s, even the campus performance of athletes now tends to be almost as good as for non-athletes (who don’t get such special attentions) while the long-term outcomes continue to be good.
February 11, 2017
The textbook examines issues of college sports, taking into account myths and examine the data behind it. Shulman and Bowen look at several assumptions behind college athletics, such as: 1) College sports build character. 2) Schools worry about programs because of alumni donations 3) Good schools play by different rules 4) Gender equity gives women more opportunities 5) College sports make money for the university 6) Today’s athletes are more like those of the past. They examine diverse schools, such as 1) public university and big time sports school Michigan which ran a deficit 2), small liberal arts Williams College, which did not allow its lacrosse team to compete in playoffs, despite being #1 in Division III. Here, academics takes precedence. 3) Northwestern, a private school which put in money to upgrade its sports infrastructure and eventually built a successful program 4) Princeton, which attempted to cut its wrestling program to save costs and meet Title IX regulations but encountered alumni backlash that resulted in the program being saved but becoming self-funded.
March 12, 2011
The Game of Life examines looks at college sports and tries to go beyond the common myths related to college sports. The authors looks at a variety of schools from public Division I schools to private Division III colleges. They primarily use data about students from three different years (1951, 1976 and 1989) and both compare student athletes to the student body at large, but also to the different eras. The also examine the cost of sports, and look at some of the myths related to the profitability of programs. The authors are obviously fans of college sports, and are not looking to tear down the system, but to critically examine it and to offer suggestions for improvement.
What I found most interesting, and most surprising, is that athletics actually have a bigger affect on smaller private schools, rather than the large Division I schools. Because the small schools can't offer scholarships, more athletes are actually admitted than are needed. Additionally, the athletes makes up a much larger percentage of the campus population than they do at large schools.
The book is a bit academic, and is not exactly a page turner. If you're not willing to put up with trying to get through all of that, the last few chapters provide both a good summary and several interesting thoughts about reforming the system.
What I found most interesting, and most surprising, is that athletics actually have a bigger affect on smaller private schools, rather than the large Division I schools. Because the small schools can't offer scholarships, more athletes are actually admitted than are needed. Additionally, the athletes makes up a much larger percentage of the campus population than they do at large schools.
The book is a bit academic, and is not exactly a page turner. If you're not willing to put up with trying to get through all of that, the last few chapters provide both a good summary and several interesting thoughts about reforming the system.
July 26, 2012
Reads like a quantitative dissertation, but it has solid information on the difference between students and student-athletes at various institutions.
January 6, 2023
Came across this gem again. Back in my undergrad years, really helped me to understand why collegiate sports left such a bad taste in my mouth
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