Athletics are central to today’s entertainment driven world. Whether it is football, basketball, or baseball, fans are constantly obsessing over games. Spectators place all their time in thinking about the outcome of the game, while the individual athletes’ best interest is completely overlooked. No one seems to question whether or not an athlete has learned anything other than what pertains to their sport. In reality, college athletes are not given the education needed to succeed further in life. Collegiate student athletes have been taking “paper classes”, also known as “scam classes”, in order to pass requirements set by the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Many college athletes cannot read past an eighth grade level (Ganim). This
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Unlike the 2% of athletes who go professional, the other 98% needs to find something else to do. However, these college students do not have the sufficient education to use for any other profession. For more than half of these students’ lives, they have been playing their sport. Transitioning away from being an athlete to something completely different is very difficult because they are not adequately prepared for life after. Athletes have to give up a good portion of who they previously were in order to move on. If collegiate student athletes were given a meaningful education, they would have something to rely on after their sport days were over. They would not have to feel like they had no purpose in the world after college. Athletes’ schedules are setting them up to fail in the future. Basketball player Rashanda McCants and football player Devon Ramsay filed a lawsuit against UNC last year regarding this issue (Svrluga). The lawsuit discusses how the classes given to athletes “were designed for students to pass easily” and “deprived athletes of the education they were promised” (Svrluga). The former athletes argued how many scholarship athletes agreed to attend UNC and other schools for that matter and to represent them on the field in exchange for “academically sound classes with legitimate educational instruction”, however NCAA and UNC failed to provide that (Svrluga). They go on to
Unlike the 2% of athletes who go professional, the other 98% needs to find something else to do. However, these college students do not have the sufficient education to use for any other profession. For more than half of these students’ lives, they have been playing their sport. Transitioning away from being an athlete to something completely different is very difficult because they are not adequately prepared for life after. Athletes have to give up a good portion of who they previously were in order to move on. If collegiate student athletes were given a meaningful education, they would have something to rely on after their sport days were over. They would not have to feel like they had no purpose in the world after college. Athletes’ schedules are setting them up to fail in the future. Basketball player Rashanda McCants and football player Devon Ramsay filed a lawsuit against UNC last year regarding this issue (Svrluga). The lawsuit discusses how the classes given to athletes “were designed for students to pass easily” and “deprived athletes of the education they were promised” (Svrluga). The former athletes argued how many scholarship athletes agreed to attend UNC and other schools for that matter and to represent them on the field in exchange for “academically sound classes with legitimate educational instruction”, however NCAA and UNC failed to provide that (Svrluga). They go on to