UNC report finds 18 years of academic fraud to keep athletes playing

[spanone]

Chapel Hill, North Carolina (CNN) -- For 18 years, thousands of students at the prestigious University of North Carolina took fake "paper classes," and advisers funneled athletes into the program to keep them eligible, according to a scathing independent report released Wednesday.

"These counselors saw the paper classes and the artificially high grades they yielded as key to helping some student-athletes remain eligible," Kenneth Wainstein wrote in his report. He conducted an eight-month investigation into the scandal, which has plagued the university for nearly five years.

Four employees have been fired and five more disciplined because of their roles. One other former employee had honorary status removed, Chancellor Carol Folt said Wednesday.

Wainstein is the former federal prosecutor hired by UNC to independently investigate the academic fraud brought to light by CNN, the Raleigh News & Observer and other media outlets.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/22/us/unc-report-academic-fraud/index.html?hpt=hp_t1

[BlueJazz]

1. I wonder if they did the same "Favors" for students taking science courses ??

[spanone]

3. or in music programs....our schools are nothing less than recruiters for prof. sports

[linuxman]

2. I'll file this one under "N"

for "No fucking shit"

[tularetom]

4. CNN did this???!?

What, there were no missing planes, ISIS scares or Ebola panic for them to beat to death?

[malaise]

5. Saw the report

NCAA better deal with this madness.

[JonLP24]

15. NCAA better deal with themselves

They're the problem.

This is the world they prefer to live in, they'll come down hard because it is preferable to competing for the services of athletes in the open market so the billions in revenue (far more than the NFL and even more thanks to the media consolidation practices by the major athletic conferences) will be shared by the top.

[sharp_stick]

6. I'd normally say

that a school would get the NCAA death penalty for a couple of years in every sport that took part.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_penalty_(NCAA)

But this is UNC, which isn't quite like Duke but still.... so they'll be hard pressed to get more than a slap on the wrist.

If this was Duke they'd probably hand Krzyzewski a trophy and call him a genius for getting the grades up even if he wasn't involved in it.

[Lurks Often]

7. And water is wet

UNC leadership probably at least suspected this and ignored it until CNN ran a story, which forced UNC to look like it was "doing something" to fix the problem.

Men's football and basketball (and women's basketball in some states) is often a moneymaker for a university/college. It lets them improve the campus, give out more scholarships, etc. A sports scholarship also gives some a chance to get a degree that they would have not been able to afford or because their grades weren't good enough for an academic scholarship.

So of course a university is going to make serious attempts to make sure their athletes keep their GPA high to be allowed to play, sometimes they do it legitimately and sometimes not.

[spanone]

8. it's called fraud.

[Lurks Often]

9. Lots and lots of more important things to be bothered by then this

[MineralMan]

11. There are often lots of things to be bothered about.

Some people bother about some of them and some people bother about others.

There are plenty of people around to be bothered about everything without diminishing others' bothering.

It's not a zero-sum thing.

[MineralMan]

10. I suspect that similar schemes are in place

all across the country. The old jokes about "Basketweaving 101" are old jokes because this kind of nonsense is as old as the hills.

[Lee-Lee]

12. It wasn't even a well kept secret.

When I was in high school in NC it was a pretty open secret that if you were going to play sports at UNC you were steered toward a major in African Studies.

[JonLP24]

14. To add to what Lee-Lee said

Based on the time needed for some majors and casework and study hours balanced with the practice and time needed to keep making the team in order to stay enrolled with the school due to 1-year scholarships which where created to give coaches the flexibility to cut players in favor of better performing ones.

I don't know what goes into African-American studies but players are often encouraged to go into the majors that require less work & time (opportunity cost) and they really don't need the coaches as they find out on their own.

If you go past the titles and go into the meat of the study you find exactly this type of thing documented.
http://digital.law.washington.edu/dspace-law/bitstream/handle/1773.1/262/81washlrev71.pdf

[JonLP24]

13. The same schools that helped create the rules are the same ones breaking them

Why? More affordable to have the monopsonic rule (agreement among competitors not to pay more than a fixed price for a key input, such as labor) and cheat on the side rather than compete for their services like they do with coaches.

The athletes particularly the male high revenue generating sports see their wealth being transfered which also leads to coaches demanding higher salaries (big time universities are able to compete with the pros in salary offers though with the revenue the NCAA generates, college athletes could probably negotiate yearly salaries on par.

Where I'm going with this is they should end the labor practices that couldn't exist in any other industry and break it off into 2 different things. Offer them an opportunity to an education at the university but also compensate them fairly for their services. The term "student-athlete" was created because the NCAA lost a workman's comp case in Colorado in 1950s. Consider why only 1-year salaries were the norm (and still are but some forward thinking schools like University of Southern California are offering 4).

While UNC is the focus of the scandal, I think the scandal is the entire NCAA operation.

[hifiguy]

16. Yesterday one of the local sports-talk guys

who is a pretty good guy and definitely not a neanderthal or an ex-jock, read some of the essays by "student athletes" that were awarded A/A- grades in the course of this scandal.

"Sub-literate" would be a generous description thereof.

The simple fact is that a lot of athletes, especially at elite athletic schools like UNC, have no business being within ten miles of any college campus. About 15 years ago there was a similar scandal at my alma mater, the University of Minnesota, so I am not picking on UNC here. I know that it's an excellent school, academically speaking.