Reclaiming the Game: College Sports and Educational Values

A measure of the tortured relationship between higher education and sports is the fact that this is the second substantial book by William Bowen on this topic. The former President of Princeton and the present head of the Mellon Foundation, Bowen deployed the considerable resources of the Mellon Foundation to address this topic. The prior book, The Game of Life, was controversial because of conclusions that athletics have had a distorting effect on admissions and academic life at institutions thought to be free of the gross distortions seen at American Universities with scholarship driven athletic programs. After studying prestigious and very selective schools like the Ivy League universities and smaller schools like Amherst, Williams, and Wesleyan, Bowen and his co-author concluded that athletes enjoyed substantial and unmerited advantages in admissions, tended to relatively underperform academically, and actually had a negative effect on campus life. There conclusions were assailed, sometimes with some force, on the basis of limited data samples and reliance on anecdotal information. In the present book, Bowen returns with a considerably expanded dataset and a number of new analyses. The effect is to overwhelmingly confirm the prior conclusions. While one could probably find defects in some of the individual analyses, Bowen and Levin have done so many evaluations reaching the same conclusions that it is inescapable to conclude that they are correct. For example, they analyze data from 3 groups of schools with differing admissions policies towards recruited athletes and find a strong correlation between the relative advantage enjoyed by recruited athletes and academic underperformance. This kind of dose-effect relationship is very strong data. In addition, the conclusions drawn from their dataset are consonant with qualitative impressions and with the conclusions of independent studies done at individual schools in their dataset. Bowen and Levin have successfully overcome the challenges of their critics. A corollary point is that their critics have never offered any substantial data to back the implied claim that athletics produce unique benefits. Bowen and Levin conclude with a series of recommendations for reform which are quite sensible. It has to be mentioned that one of the goals of their reform program is actually to broaden participation in college athletics. These suggestions should be pursued. Bowen and Levin have a nice discussion of how this unfortunate state of affairs developed. The problems with athletics at these schools mirror and to some extent are driven by parallel changes in larger society. As these colleges have come to overvalue athletics, so has youth sports become semi-professionalized. This has created a typical vicious circle; parents, knowing that good colleges highly value athletics, drive their children down the road of early specialization in a sport and year round competition. In turn, the strong

The authors have collected an enormous amount of data and presented it lucidly and tellingly. That alone is worth the price of the book. However one feels about elite institutions using different admission standards for recruited athletes,the authors should be given credit for illuminating the facts. Most of the criticism I have seen has been of the "Kill the Messenger" variety, from people who clearly have "an axe to grind." To those whose minds are not already made up, I suggest reading the book.