Ryan Kerns
Colleges have almost always had certain standards for incoming students in order to maintain a decent scholarly reputation. However, over the past couple of decades, a movement towards accepting kids based on their athletic abilities instead of for their academics has become increasingly predominant. Ever since intercollegiate football started in the (quote book), colleges have been using football, among many other sports, to obtain publicity and eventually money from having an entertaining sports program. According to Murray Sperber, in his introduction to the book, Beer and Circus: How Big Time College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education, “[colleges] spend increasing amounts of money on their athletic departments, and use big-time college sports-commercial entertainment around which many undergraduates organize their hyperactive social lives-to keep their students happy and distracted and the tuition dollars rolling in.” This basically means that colleges use their sports to just distract other students while they pay outrageous tuition costs to keep the program going. However, what college admissions administrators don’t realize is that they are seriously jeopardizing the integrity of their academics. More specifically, colleges are making room for these often sub standard athletes by rejecting the kids with well a very impressive academic history. This has increasingly become a problem recently with the ever increasing competition that accompanies applying for colleges. It has become the social norm for kids to attend college right after high school and with so many scholarships available like the HOPE scholarship, hundreds of thousands of high school students apply for colleges annually. According to the USA Today, in its article, College Acceptance Rates: How Many Get In?, almost 5,000,000 kids applied to colleges in 2006 and according to the Georgia Tech Admissions page, approximately 11,500 students applied to Georgia Tech this year alone. This creates huge amounts of competition leading kids to work harder and harder every year in high school to put them on the right academic when it comes to applying for their favorite colleges. However, these high school athletes sometimes get first pick over those kids that have worked vigorously for four years and have earned the right to attend the college of their dreams. Why should these athletes get precedence over the kids that have worked so hard to get where they are? Is it really worth a few more seats occupied during the weekly football games? What is academic integrity worth to college admissions these days?
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