Jock Majors

At the beginning of most televised football games, the fanciest graphics roll out with the starting lineups. Picture after picture of muscular young men scrolls across the screen, each with a caption telling viewers who the player is, where he is from, and, occasionally, what his major is.

The details are supposed to humanize the helmeted, to make fans realize that when this guy isn’t performing superhuman feats of football prowess, he is a regular college student, just like his classmates.

Sometimes, though, the viewer stops and thinks something like, “Why are so many of them majoring in sociology?” Or worse, “You can major in that?”

General studies? Commercial recreation? Corporate communications? Adult fitness? Residential-property management?

At some colleges, those may be perfectly respectable disciplines. But it’s a common perception that athletes who play major-college sports are allowed -- and even encouraged -- to enroll in fields of study that let them maneuver through the maze of academic requirements and remain eligible to compete.

A Chronicle review of the academic choices of football players who competed in this year’s bowl games demonstrates that there are indeed clusters of athletes in particular fields of study on virtually every campus. When 10 percent or more of players are enrolled in a field like communications, but less than 1 percent of undergraduates are, it doesn’t seem like a coincidence.

Take agricultural programs at Texas A&M University at College Station. Nearly a quarter of Aggie football players are studying agricultural development or agricultural and life sciences, but only 3 percent of all A&M undergraduates major in those two programs.

“There’s a percentage of student-athletes who truly want to major in agriculture,” says Stephen E. McDonnell, A&M’s associate athletics director for academic affairs. “Another percentage is in there because agriculture has been supportive, friendly, and willing to accommodate the needs of students who have grades below 2.25.”

Every institution in the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s Division I-A has programs like those. Whether or not they admit it, academic advisers sometimes steer athletes into specific courses and degree programs to make it easier for them to meet the NCAA’s academic standards. Athletics directors defend the practice, pointing out that professors and administrators, not coaches, are the ones who approve courses and majors.

Academic advisers say it is bound to become more of a trend as the NCAA phases in new academic standards that will require athletes to complete more of their course work in order to stay eligible for sports. The new rules are supposed to improve athletes’ graduation rates, which for years have lagged behind those of their classmates, but the policy may push more athletes into easier academic programs, devaluing the degrees they eventually do earn.

One of the most vexing problem of college sports is that institutions admit young men and women based on their athletic potential more than their academic profile and then expect them to perform as athletes and as students. Particularly in the high-profile sports of men’s basketball and football, players have a tough time in the classroom for any number of reasons, including having attended poor high schools, daydreaming about the millions they think they’ll make in the pros, and dealing with the oppressive demands of practice and competition.

How does an athletics department deal with that problem? By steering athletes with weaker academic backgrounds into programs where they will have the least trouble. Most football teams in this year’s bowl games have at least 10 percent of their players majoring in a single degree program; several have a tenth of the team in two or three programs. That is 10 percent of the entire team, including underclassmen who have yet to declare majors.

Data provided by the universities surveyed demonstrate that it is rare for 10 percent of students who have actually declared majors to cluster in the same field.

At the Georgia Institute of Technology, for example, 56 percent of the football players are majoring in management. Among Georgia Tech undergraduates, only 11 percent are management majors, fewer than computer science or mechanical engineering. No Ramblin’ Wreck football players are majoring in mechanical engineering.

Georgia Tech officials say the reason is simple: Management is one of the university’s few programs without substantial laboratory requirements. Football demands a major time commitment, year-round, so it’s very difficult for most players to manage class, labs, and practice.

“It’s a challenge,” says Robert C. McMath Jr., the provost. “We’re like anybody else in that we have a gap between the average high-school GPA’s and SAT’s for the overall freshman class and the average varsity athlete. Even though we do have some student-athletes majoring in all of the engineering fields, it’s very difficult to manage that with the kind of in-season practice schedules and basically year-round work in the weight room they have to do. So it’s not surprising that there would be some clustering” in management and some of Tech’s few liberal-arts programs.

Lots of players at many colleges study management. Other popular programs are more obscure. Take Virginia Tech, where 12 of 100 football players are majoring in residential-property management. According to Rosemary C. Goss, the professor in charge of the program, it is one of only two such undergraduate majors in the country. And it enrolls a fraction of 1 percent of Tech undergraduates.

Ms. Goss says that football players started coming around after André Davis, the Hokies’ all-American kick returner who graduated in 2001, enrolled in the program.

Mr. Davis persuaded a number of his teammates to join him because of the opportunities the program would give them after their football careers were over.

She admits that the program’s popularity also stems from its admissions standards, which require a grade-point average of only 2.0 in a student’s first two years at the university. Enrolling in Virginia Tech’s engineering or business programs requires much higher grades.

“I don’t think they see it as an easy way out because the classes aren’t particularly easy,” Ms. Goss says. “At the same time, it’s not like engineering.”

Residential-property management isn’t a gut program, she says. Students who major in it learn something about real estate, financial management, and how to handle themselves in professional settings. And her football players are as serious about their classes as any other undergraduates, she says.

“Some, who just come here to play football, those are the ones I give to somebody else,” Ms. Goss says. “There’s one every couple of years I really wish had decided to do something else.”

Greater Flexibility

Athletes cluster in majors not only at engineering-oriented institutions. Nearly a third of the football players at the University of Southern Mississippi are majoring in coaching and sport administration. At the University of Louisville, 23 percent of the team is in justice administration. Twenty-two of the 100 players at the University of Central Florida major in liberal studies.

In general, the most popular majors among football players are business, communication, criminal justice, sociology, and sport management, not necessarily in that order and certainly not on every campus. Clemson University has 19 players in human-resource development; the University of Texas at Austin has 17 in youth and community studies. Many teams have large numbers of players in generalized programs, such as liberal arts at the University of Miami.

“Liberal arts is probably the most flexible of the degree programs,” says Tomas F. Jimenez, assistant athletics director at Miami. “If a student maybe isn’t set on what he wants to do, he can choose a bachelor’s of liberal arts.”

An Easy Route

Universities, especially public ones, are putting more and more resources into a handful of flagship undergraduate programs, usually in business. They are also allowing the programs to become more exclusive, requiring students to earn high grades and undergo a competitive admissions process just to be allowed to major in them.

That’s certainly the case at Texas A&M, where the recently fired football coach, R.C. Slocum, complained that he was at a disadvantage because his players had no “general studies” program like their peers in the Big 12 Conference. Applicants to the Mays Business School must have stellar high-school credentials and apply in the 12th grade, or they must have A’s and B’s in their first 33 credit hours as A&M students.

Texas A&M teams always have a core group with GPA’s from 2.0 to 2.25, says Mr. McDonnell, the athletics official. Members of that group have no chance at getting into the competitive majors, so many of them start out in the general-studies program and go on to the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

Seventeen A&M football players are majoring in agricultural development, nine in agricultural and life sciences. Those numbers, considered as percentages of the team, are much higher than in the student body as a whole.

Tougher Times Ahead

Mr. McDonnell and other academic advisers for athletes worry that the NCAA’s new rules on academic eligibility will force athletes to choose majors early and will make it difficult for them to change fields. The standards, which go into effect this fall, will require athletes to complete 40 percent of their course work toward a degree in order to be eligible to play in their third year, 60 percent before their fourth year, and 80 percent before their fifth year.

The standards -- which also include new and somewhat more lax requirements for incoming freshman athletes -- are designed to increase graduation rates for football and men’s basketball players. The NCAA has been pilloried for decades because of the number of star players who have come and gone, unscathed by their studies and unprepared by their universities. Over the past 16 years, the association has steadily refined its academic requirements to encourage more athletes to earn their degrees.

Penalties and Rewards

This week, at its annual convention in Anaheim, Calif., the NCAA will begin the first round of discussions on possible penalties and rewards for teams based on academic standards. Those with many athletes below the 40-60-80 thresholds might lose scholarships, or be banned from championship tournaments, or be disqualified from the NCAA’s revenue-sharing deals. Specific standards, however, are still being discussed.

Academic advisers say the new standards will make life difficult for athletes who transfer from one institution to another, especially from junior colleges. The rules may well force athletes to major in easier subjects, given that they will have to take a large number of courses that all count toward a major earlier in their college careers.

The march toward tougher standards and, the NCAA hopes, higher graduation rates begs a crucial question, however: What do numbers matter if players are being sent into academic programs that won’t give them a meaningful education or marketable skills?

Francis L. Lawrence, the departing president of Rutgers University and a member of the NCAA’s Division I Board of Directors, played down those concerns during a September news conference.

“I realize that schools have majors that are easier for athletes,” Mr. Lawrence said. “On the other hand, students will major in what they do best in, whether it’s criminal justice, or sociology, or biology, and I don’t think any coach is going to turn them off to something else.”

The goal for presidents and coaches alike, Mr. Lawrence said, ought to be enabling athletes to “have a decent life and get a college degree in something they can then get a job in.”

For academic advisers and others, it will take a little more creativity to meet that goal in the next few years. Especially when athletes see academics as a necessary evil on the road to the pros. Take an attitude like that of Paul Kariya, a former University of Maine at Orono hockey player now with the Anaheim Mighty Ducks.

As he told ESPN The Magazine last month: “Basket weaving is basket weaving. It doesn’t matter where you take it.”

http://chronicle.com Section: Athletics Volume 49, Issue 19, Page A33