With the advent of N-I-L (name, image, likeness) and the transfer portal, college sports are now minor league professional sports.  That’s blunt, but that is the truth.  It marks a major failure in our universities.

The argument for these changes has been that they permitted “student-athletes” to participate in the massive money college sports generate and to give those athletes, many from impoverished circumstances and with few post college prospects, to make some money.  It is this latter argument that marks the utter and complete failure of the university.

The idea used to be that an athletic scholarship permitted a student that might otherwise not be able to attend university to do so, thus obtaining an education and bettering his/her post college prospects.  What these changes admit is that so-called “student-athletes” do not come out of their university experience equipped to make a good living apart from sports.  In other words, they are not educated – the university has failed.

Now, if our universities cannot educate the most visible of their students, what is going on with all those students we don’t see?  Are they being educated?  Well, the indications are strong they are not – indoctrinated perhaps, but educated?  Not seeing it.  Have you interviewed a recent grad for a job lately?  We all come out of college a lot dumber than we think we are, but in recent years that gap has grown exponentially.  During covid they basically handed degrees out to anybody willing to fork over the tuition, and things are not improving from there at anything approaching a reasonable pace.

But then, is an education about the provider of that education or the student?  I have met a lot of far-from-smart people that went to the most prestigious and presumably best universities.  I have also met any number of truly brilliant individuals that went to schools you never heard of.  We all know the old adage about leading horses to water.  Are universities failing to educate students or are they simply meeting the expectations of their “customers” (students?)

I have been reflecting lately on our need for genuine leadership.  We don’t really have leaders anymore, we have panderers – people seeking a leadership position and telling people what they want to hear and giving them what they want in order to gain that position.  We think leadership a matter of position, but it is not, it is a matter of inspiration.  Professors cannot educate students; they can only inspire them to educate themselves and help them along the way.  The missing element here is the inspiration.

So, what is really revealed in all this is that the “student-athlete” does not care about their education, they care about their sport.  Other students don’t care about their education, they care about the degree.  And no one is helping them to think otherwise.  So where do we break this cycle?  Who do we blame for the breakdown?

I don’t know, but what I do know is that continuing the spiral with things like N-I-L is no solution.  I also know we did not get here in the stroke of a pen, and we cannot get out of here any faster.  I know that while we are inspiring students to get an education, we need to help them learn patience.