College sports programs cheat athletes out of quality educations and treat them like money-makers, claims a senator in a bombshell report published Thursday that takes aim at schools and the NCAA for turning a blind eye to a ‘broken system.’
Sen. Chris Murphy in the report accused college programs of not providing players the true value that he said should come with sports scholarships, instead placing more priority on the millions to be made on the playing field.
Players are denied achieving their true academic dreams by inadequate educational opportunities, often times never graduating, Murphy warns.
‘The lack of academic integrity across college sports may be the most insidious piece of a broken system,’ he writes in the report, entitled: ‘Madness Inc., How colleges keep athletes on the field and out of the classroom.’
Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, says players are denied achieving their true academic dreams by inadequate educational opportunities, often times never graduating
Murphy says the NCAA is failing to ensure students are given an adequate education in exchange for their play. Pictured are teammates congratulating running back Tatum Bell of the Oklahoma State Cowboys
Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, earlier this year released the first part of the report, which was critical of schools that claim scholarships properly compensate players for their time on the field.
‘The NCAA’s primary response to my first report was that students are compensated, in their opinion. They believe that scholarship is adequate compensation for all of the time students put in and all the money they make for the system,’ Murphy tells the HuffPost.
‘But there are a lot of students who are in the big time college programs where schools are treating them like commodities and not giving them the education that they deserve.’
Stephen Cline, a former defensive lineman for Kansas State University, says he was discouraged by the school from using his scholarship to pursue his dream of becoming a veterinarian. Instead, Cline claims he was pushed to settle for a less-demanding major so he could concentrate on his whole reason for being at the school: football.
‘The whole time … I felt stuck – stuck in football, stuck in my major,’ he said. ‘Now I look back and say, “well what did I really go to college for?” Crap classes you won’t use the rest of your life? I was majoring in football.’
Jonathan Cruz, who played offensive line for Oklahoma State University, said his academic advisers completed coursework for him and other athletes so they could maintain eligibility rather than focus on real learning.
‘I would write them, and they would take them and just completely change everything about it because it was just so awful,’ he says. ‘I never really learned how to write a paper, but I had to pull a B in Comp I, and I pulled my B in Comp I.’
Stephen Cline, a former defensive lineman for Kansas State University, says: ‘The whole time…I felt stuck – stuck in football, stuck in my major,’ he said. ‘Now I look back and say, ‘well what did I really go to college for?’ Crap classes you won’t use the rest of your life? I was majoring in football’
Murphy: ‘The way that the federal government traditionally measures graduation rates, schools are held accountable for those who drop out’
Murphy, in his report, argues athletes are being defrauded, especially with few receiving a quality degree, or any degree at all.
He also accuses the NCAA of covering up the problem with a method of measuring graduation rates that inflates the numbers.
The NCAA’s ‘Graduation Success Rate’ can inflate schools’ rate totals because it credits the school when an athlete transfers to another school in good academic standing. However, there is often no follow up, leaving no way of telling how well students are doing at their new schools.
‘The way that the federal government traditionally measures graduation rates, schools are held accountable for those who drop out,’ Murphy tells HuffPost.
‘But [the NCAA] has rigged their own measure of graduation, so that if a kid potentially drops out of the program, nobody’s responsible for that kid. And that’s not measured in the dozens. As we showed in this report, there are thousands of kids who have dropped out of school who were playing sports, but weren’t counted when it comes to graduation rates.’