Sports scholarships are a stupid idea, period, and should be abolished.
Being a full-time student and being a professional or semi-professional athlete are both full-time jobs. Pretending that people can be both in a serious way is a farce, and does a disservice not only to the unpaid workers (athletes) most of whom end up receiving mediocre educations, but also does a disservice to the rest of the school, devaluing other students work. That football and basketball coaches are the highest paid public employees in most US states is an absolute travesty.
The main reason schools have sports scholarships is to milk money out of alumni for whom having their old college's team win sports titles is a meaningful part of their identity, and gain tax advantages &c. for sports teams compared to being independent. Just like most things, if you follow the money you find out that a small handful of people are making a killing out of a system that screws everyone else in ways large and small. We’d be better off as a society if those alumni spent their money on something more useful (even on just donating money to independent pro sports teams if that’s what they really want to do), and professional/semi-professional sports teams properly paid their athletes for their labor, in a context entirely detached from colleges.
(Note: I have no problem with college athletics otherwise. If full time students want to also play sports competitively, that’s wonderful. It’s building college athletics into a money/hype maching – recruiting full-time athletes to play on the teams without pay while pretending to be students, with the school managing the experience so they can get a diploma without doing the same work as other students, using the good social image of education to give the system a respectable veneer – that makes a mockery of both athletics and education.)
