Academic Rankings and Athletic Success...

I completely agree with you that national championships in football (or any other sport) shouldn’t add (or remove) value from a degree. Sadly, however, sometimes the TV exposure can go further than the fact that your (ChemE in my case) program is ranked in the top whatever (5) in the nation.

in my soph year of hs I had no idea where I wanted to go/what to major in. I was just really getting into football at the time and was totally mesmerized by the longhorns first rose bowl and eventually the national championship season. As shallow as it is, I said to myself “That’s where I’m going, I’m going to UT”. I never applied anywhere else and didn’t care to. Now I’m majoring in Biomedical Engineering which has nothing to do with athletics but I like to think I have Texas football to thank for bringing me to such a great campus.

I’ve got a degree from Notre Dame (save it, I know), and without football, it would certainly be more like Fordham. High profile is good, so long as it’s supported by strong academics. I’ve found good-natured jesting about college sports is pretty common among professionals. About half of the attorneys at my firm have some sort of college sports memento around their office. It could be a self-selecting lot – those who go to small schools never did “get it”, and instead sought other aspects of the college experience that are found at Colgate, etc. Few people really choose a school based purely on academics. Those who like the UT atmosphere (and sports are part of it) chose to go there, and admissions makes sure they are the equivalent of those who attend for mostly academic reasons. Anyway, the academic value of a degree fades pretty quickly once you start having to compile actual accomplishments, so it’s arguably immature to boast about your undergrad’s academic prowess after about age 28 or so, anyway. Wow, enough of this post.

When people brag to random strangers about “their” football/basketball/whatever team. Among friends, it’s all good, but it seems strange to me, particularly as I don’t really follow professional sports.

I root for our athletic teams partly because I went to school there, but also partly because I represented Texas athletically as well at the club sports level. Not being varsity didn’t make it any less heated and intense among the area schools, just less well-attended by the public.

I wore the burnt orange proudly in college, and I’ll cheer for those of my colleagues who do the same.

“University of Florida remains a solid school on similar academic ground with UT”

Um, no. Florida is not on similar academic ground at Texas. Both are large, flagship universities located in temperate climates. The similarities end there.

Texas maintains a higher academic profile and receives a much greater amount of federal research dollars. I agree that Texas is on similar academic ground with California (Berkley), Michigan, and North Carolina. That’s it. That’s the list.

The remainder of the Big 11, the remainder of the California system except Merced, and UVa have better academics and research than Florida. Outside Vanderbilt, the SEC remains a vast wasteland of academics. Great football, solid research, but poor academic profiles.

I have read several academic journal articles that show a strong correlation between successful athletics programs and academic programs. That is, people tend to think the University of Alabama and USC have better academics than they actually do because of those school’s success in football.

High school students, I suspect, choose schools on a variety of factors depending on the student. Texas Tech and Texas State get kids because of the schools’ prowess in beer drinking.

When I was searching out colleges to apply to in high school, my only thought was to get the hell out of Texas after noticing the small minds and realizing that going out of state would benefit me by being “farther than at home Where small experience grows”, as Shakespeare said.

Athletics were the farthest thing from my mind, and I ended up here in DC at American University, where men’s athletics consist of a sometimes-decent basketball team, a soccer team, wrestling, and swimming/diving. (How we’re D1 boggles my mind.)

I could’ve gone straight to UT having been in the top 10%, but I chose not to – it had more to do with wanting to do something different from the majority of my high school’s alumni who either went to TSU or UT or any of the other schools in a 50 mile radius.

Do I wish I had gone to UT instead? Sometimes, yes. Being away from Texas made me realize how much I appreciate it and how proud I am to be a Texan. UT began to represent everything Texas to me, and so its athletics had a bigger significance since it’s the most recognizable symbol of Texas the state to the rest of the country.

I’m still glad I got a degree outside of the state, so when I inevitably move back I’ll hopefully seem to come with a different perspective. But again, athletics never had a hand in my decision of colleges, nor was it a factor in my college life (except for rooting for UT on TV).

I know that’s the popular sentiment of our present time, but upper-level studies was originally considered a way to enrich oneself with knowledge and experience, not a way simply to make more money. There are plenty of people who find jobs later that are not in line with their college major, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I’m not saying people should just be impractical, but I actually find it sad that the current attitudes on universities are their ability to be factories that churn out workers. They are places of higher learning, which may lead to a high paying job but it may not.

I got both an accounting degree and a philosophy degree from UT, and I know UT is ranked fairly high in both categories in the country. However, part of what bugged me about my fellow business students was how they woodenly looked at the high ranking of the McCombs Business School and their respective GPAs as tickets to a “dream job” (and many of them end up unhappy as they become corporate slaves). There are many smart people in the business school, but instead of looking at being truly educated, they were artificially concerned about buttering up to professors and recruiters to be able to land a job. It’s of course good to be concerned for the future, but instead of worrying about their personal maturity and education, they simply go through the motions and regurgitate in some classes in order to get that A, promptly letting everything flutter out of their heads right after that class.

Thus, with all due respect, I disagree with your girlfriend; I don’t think it should be the ultimate point of college to land you a job (though you certainly have to question the quality of the school’s education if it’s not respected anywhere). The point is to become a more enriched, educated person, and that does not always tie into particular rankings. These days, even the Ivy league is overrated, with an increased emphasis on “personal fit” and culture. Therefore, while nobody should come to Texas because of sports fandom, it is an experience that is worth considering as you choose a university. You don’t do all your learning, maturing, and experiencing in the classroom.

The recent changes to the Top 10% rule should help UT, and I think it’s not enough. Instead of putting a limit on the Top 10%, I think they should couple that rule with other factors that are universal across the board, such as SAT/ACT scores, AP classes and tests, etc. That help lessen the incredible academic distance between schools across the state. Being the valedictorian at one school, regrettably, is not always equal to even being in the Top 15% at another. I don’t think it is all unreasonable to expect the Top 10% to have a certain minimum SAT score and to have taken AP courses in order to get automatic admission to a school like Texas. Not only do I think this would dramatically lessen the amount of students getting auto admissions, this will allow those who, for whatever reason, are not in the Top 10% or otherwise just miss that minimum score to be considered on other merits.

There are some studies that have been carried out to determine the effect that athletic success has on the increase of applications at these successful schools. I took a Comparative Economic Theory writing component class last month in the first summer sesh at UT, and one of my peers wrote his paper on such an article.

I had to critique it, and from what I can remember, there was a 2-8% increase in applications for schools whose teams win the BCS national championship. So there is some merit to the idea that athletic success has an influence over where people decide to go to apply. Especially males.

I had always assumed that people understood the University of Texas is a solid undergraduate education, but it does not stand up to the top tier Public Universities in reputation. You can quibble about the quality of the actual education, but outside Texas it does not garner the same respect that UNC, Michigan, and especially Berkley and UVA bring to the table. Additionally, out east it usually slots behind Wisconsin and Vanderbilt as well.

Secondly, I don’t think anyone quibbles that UT’s graduate programs are among the best in the country. You can argue about whether they stand up to Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Chicago, but a science, business or law graduate degree from UT makes you a big swinging d*ck anywhere.

Thirdly, in an odd sort of way, the 10% rule has created a perception about Texas’ undergrad program academic reputation because it has gotten so hard to get in now. When I applied to schools in 92, Texas was our safety school. I went East to a liberal arts college because of the general perception that while Texas was ok, most of the students in the top tier of my highschool (Westlake) didn’t want to go because of excessive class size, heavy use of TA’s instead of tenured Professor at the undergraduate levels, and the schools reputation as a research institute that didn’t care about undergrads.

I think the 10% rule has created a perception in state that Texas is good because it’s difficult to get into. But nobody outside of Texas knows, or frankly cares about that.

Having said all this, Texas still represents, for my money, one of the best bang for the bucks you can get, given the low cost of instate tuition.

On the topic at hand, having gone to a DIII school with a terrible football team, the reputation of your sports teams is not only meaningless in a professional environment, mentioning it reveals you as a rube of the first order.

Collegiate athletics is an intriguing phenomenon in which its main draw or popular appeal is not based on the competition of particular sports teams within their respective activities and arenas, but more importantly that a method is presented whereby two institutions of higher learning are seeming battling one another in a non-academic setting. Universities do not have objective or particular methods of direct comparison, besides outright subjective and methodologically questional surveys and studies. Football for example is one way to make a direct analysis of one university versus another, that is not offered in any seemingly meaningful academic arena (unless we are talking about debate competitions and the like). Collegiate sports is not quite the front porch to the house, it is more like the whole front yard with the grassy lawn plus with the front facade; collegiate athletics offers us a sound methodogy for comparing colleges like houses on a street without any third party (US News) trying to impute that universities should be examined in an arbitrarily determine method.

Back in high school, I was in an elite swim club in San Diego (but a comparably average swimmer), and on my team were two ladies, Blake Hayter (http://www.calbears.com/sports/w-swim/mtt/hayter_blake00.html), who set an NCAA record a few years ago, and Jen Wesley (http://www.calbears.com/sports/w-swim/mtt/wesley_jenna00.html), who were offered and accepted scholarships to swim for school by the name of “Cal”…at the time, I was unaware of what school that name refered to in particular, and I myself had not given much thought to my college selection process (early on I was thinking about Pepperdine and maybe USC, but I was thinking the most about sticking close to home and going to UC San Diego). After hearing that these two stud swimmers were going to “Cal,” I hit up Google, and very quickly I was completely, absolutely, dead-on-the-ball, damn-it-to-hell sure that I wanted my undergraduate studies to be in Berkeley…I made my choice to apply to the highest ranked public university in the world based, primarily, on listening to the college choices of a pair of swimmers…

Collegiate athletics matter differently depending on the person, but in regards to the topic of the main post, athletics is a popular means of measure because it is the ONLY objective measure, a seemingly unequivocally non-biased comparison between one school and another. Although using such a measure has its glaring shortcomings (22 men on gridiron will dictate how schools with thousands of students will be compared to one another this fall), it leaves us with finality and little grumbling, compared to seething outrage which might be generated by a shitty survey by a magazine no one reads except for the purpose of knowing what they think about your school.

But athletics matter outside of their respective arenas. USC has seen its donor offerings multiply and its academic rankings skyrocketing since Pete Carroll took over college football. This is one way that those seemingly stupid rankings can reflect reality – a good athletic program can bring in revenue and aid with the maintenance and improving of a school’s academic offerings.

That said, I am really perplexed as to why Oklahoma in particular, a college football blue-blood and dominant collegiate athletic program in its own right, does so terribly in academic surveys. You would think that a non-SEC school with a very strong sporting pedigree would be able to muster climbing into the Top 100 of American public universities…