The President of Williams College faces a firestorm for not allowing the womens 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 educations 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 todays 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 mens programs by womens, 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 societys 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.

5 Responses to “The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values”

1. Admin says:

   February 26, 2001 at 12:00 am

   The findings in this book are very important. The authors prove that Ivy League and other prestigious schools admit athletes with significantly lower SAT scores than regular students need for admission. They also prove that an “athletic culture” is taking over these schools just as it did big-time college sports schools (see the recent well-written book, Beer & Circus). Then, in their most valuable finding, they prove that women athletes are not really helped by spending so much time in sports and away from serious studies, and that athletes do not become better leaders than regular grads of schools (the book looks at many grads from the 1950s and 1970s).

   All that is good stuff but the authors make it very hard to find that out. They write in a tepid prose, full of passive constructions and qualifications, that makes reading the book very slow going. Often it is like reading against a full-court press. Although Frank DeFord endorses the book, the authors should have read a lot of his work before starting on theirs. BTW, author William Bowen is the head of the Mellon Foundation and author James Shulman is a financial officer with the foundation–no wonder they write bureaucratic prose!

   The ideas in the book are very important but many readers will be put off by the prose.
2. Admin says:

   November 19, 2002 at 12:00 am

   Let me start out by saying, I am only about a third of the way through. I am also a former student athlete and current coach. But it seems as though someone should chime in with their views on the book since no one else has. So with that in mind, take my initial observations as such.

   While I am struck by the depth of analysis and the thoroughness of their methodology, I am also struck by the sense that the authors have decidedly taken the view that college athletics, in of itself, is an entity unto itself. And that in the instances cited, are incongruent with the mission of an educational institution. While there certainly is merit in the academic performance analysis, it is unfortunate that they fail to see the merits of athletics in the educational environment. While it is easy to quantify the development of a student in a classroom, it is impossible to quantify the role of collegiate athletics in the development of the individual student. Does devoting 12 hours a week to studying for Western Civ. add something more, something more fundamental to the student that spending 10 hours a week on the practice field does not? Regretably, academicians have spent more time dismissing the value of athletics, rather than creating methodology to judge its worthiness. And while classroom performance remains something tangible and quantifiable, no one has endeavored to quantify the merits of working within a team for a common objective, experiencing leadership within a team environment, and all the ancillary benefits that are brought about from participating in collegiate athletics. Instead, they are quick to point out and highlight everything that is detrimental, but not unique to, collegiate athletics (alcohol, violence, etc.).

   My overriding concern is one that may or may not have merit and could potentially be dismissed by the end of the book. Written by and for academics, it is with great concern that this will be adopted by institutions of higher learning to justify the alienation of student-athletes based upon quantified generalizations. This could very well become the classic coffee table book that so many quote and act on, but have never read.

   I will be back for another review when I am struck with the additional thoughts that inevitably come from reading a book of this nature.
3. Mike S. Rice says:

   December 9, 2004 at 12:00 am

   This book resembles two men with a vendetta over people with a solution. Using a lot and I mean a lot of statistics they turn the data to favor their arguments. If one school out of many supports their claim, that is the stat they use, ignoring the stronger evidence. The authors do not offer solutions beyond “there should be changes made nation wide.” These are the same people who write the mellon report, so getting additional attention is their goal, over informing a reader.