If you get accepted to college because you faked being a sports star, pretty much everyone is outraged. I get that.
If you get accepted at college because you are a sports star, almost nobody seems to mind. That’s what I don’t get.
Either way, you’ve climbed the ladder by prevailing in a largely meaningless zero-sum (and hence socially useless) game, thereby signalling a dollop of narcissism together with a few mostly irrelevant talents or advantages. What’s the difference?
It may be worse than you think. The student engaged in a socially useless game, and so did the school. The logistics of sports is costly, and when they hire a teacher based on their coaching skills instead of educational clout, the students are worse off.
The Atlantic had an article a few years ago about the costs of high school sports. I know the post is about college admissions, but a lot of the issues must translate to colleges.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/10/the-case-against-high-school-sports/309447/
As an immigrant, I was as surprised as Jenny about the American obsession with school sports.
If you’re a sport star, you’ve proven that you can excel at SOMETHING.
You have proven that you can muster a not inconsiderable amount of discipline and dedication. These are highly prized qualities in America. Or at least Americans claim that they are, it looks like they are purely optional in a president.
If you’ve gotten into college by cheating, it kind of proves the opposite. If you HAD those qualities, you wouldn’t have needed to cheat, after all.
One possible argument is that even if the competition to get into college sports teams is zero-sum, the positive enjoyment that people get from watching games and rooting for their teams is non-zero-sum — but the only way for them to *experience* that joy is from knowing that everyone got on those sports teams by out-competing everyone else.
So you are mathematically correct when you argued in The Big Questions that we could hold a lottery where only 10% of the population is eligible to compete in college sports, and the resulting best-of-the-best would be *almost* as good as the best-of-the-best when drawn from the whole population, but we’d eliminate 90% of the waste. However, a lot of people probably wouldn’t enjoy the games any more.
I don’t really understand the USA high school and college sports thing. In the UK, school sports is only of interest to the players. University sports teams are pretty much ignored by everyone else.
The main exception I can think of is the Oxford / Cambridge boat race, which is televised. The universities claim that only students admitted on academic grounds are admissible, although I think there has been some bending of this rule. No scholarships are available.
I may have the wrong end of the stick totally here, so please put me right if so.
The professional teams recruit from college teams? This does at least mean the athletes get an education. Over here it is more often a choice – education or sport. This could be a useful message to send on the value of education.
“As an immigrant, I was as surprised as Jenny about the American obsession with school sports.”
Until I read the link I thought “surprised as Jenny” must be a common expression.
Interesting article. One thing struck me: ” About 160 people attended parent-teacher night, compared with six the year before.” Six?? How soul destroying for the teachers when they outnumber the parents by several to one. I am used to teachers sitting in one place with a queue of parents waiting to see them. I guess they ran it the other way round, with a queue of teachers waiting to see each parent.
Two points here.
The first one is that as Advo says. If you’ve gotten good at sports it’s more likely you know how to get good at other things. Weather you want to get better at basketball or calculus you need the time management skills to set aside some time to practice.
You also need to be able to identify your own strengths and weaknesses and figure out how to tweak practice towards those. Suck at trig integrals… first be introspective enough to notice this, second try more examples. Suck at free throws*… first be introspective enough to notice this. Second do more of them.
Maybe your trig integral practice goes badly…figure out who to ask and ask. Maybe your free throw practice goes badly…figure out who to ask and ask.
The point is if you’re trying to improve a skill, the process has quite a bit in common regardless of which specific skill it is. A student athlete has signalled that they probably have some of these skill improving traits figured out. It might be possible to actually test this comparing say freshman or sophomore college grades to high-school athletic prowess.
The second point is that while one can argue (as our host IS arguing) that the skills a high school sports star acquires are IRRELEVANT…that’s about all you can do. A person whose demonstrated a willingness to pretend to be a sports star to get into college has demonstrated some NEGATIVE qualities. Dishonesty is usually considered bad, ability to play tennis might not matter but it’s not usually considered odious. It’s not particularly inconsistent to be outraged by negative qualities being rewarded and merely quizzical or indifferent about neutral/irrelevant qualities being rewarded.
*I have no idea if this example actually makes sense in the context of basketball.
Given the flood of money in college sports, can we really argue it is a zero sum game?
Jonathan Kariv’s answer above seems so obviously on target that I have to wonder if Landsburg is just trolling us here.
To expand on Kariv’s idea: Landsburg regards this as two zero-sum games. But cheating is a *negative-sum* game: it is zero-sum between the cheater and the losers due to the cheating, but if successful, dishonesty is rewarded, and society as a whole suffers. And of course, if it is not successful, the “losers” still didn’t get admitted to university, the cheater is now tossed out, the press spends a bunch of time discussing the scandal… even more negative-sum!
Isn’t the wastefulness precisely the point? Of course sports prowess is a zero-sum game, but that seems to make it the perfect costly signaling device. And, as others have suggested, it might tap different qualities from the I-can-sit-still-for-six-hours type traits measured by the grading game. If colleges ignored sports, students would just want to turn to something else and probably even worse for welfare.
Lol, Harold. Sorry I confused you.
Jonathan Kariv @7:
To your first point, I’m not sure the students that are good at sports sucked at it to begin with. To be a star, as the post says, you have to combine talent and practice. You most likely also received a lot of adult encouragement along the way. I don’t see the sports star trajectory translating to other areas of life. This is confirmed when I look at professional sports stars: their talent outside sports seems to cover a spectrum much like the rest of us.
@Henri #13: Sure, talent in sports is a thing. So is practice though.
At the high-school level “sporting success” is probably a decent (if not great) predictor of both work ethic and sporting talent.
At the top-pro level I’d imagine that some of those people just didn’t practice academic things. Either because they realised/gambled that they didn’t have to or because they ran into time constraints.
I haven’t followed the recent college admission scandal too closely but I thought that some of the issue was that the fakers would claim “to have played for their high school” rather than “to have been been a multi-time national/world champion”. In any case I had the impression that having played sports at a level above “didn’t bother” but below “can help the college win some games”, is usually viewed as a plus by admissions committees?
Jonathan Kariv (#7) :
A person whose demonstrated a willingness to pretend to be a sports star to get into college has demonstrated some NEGATIVE qualities. Dishonesty is usually considered bad, ability to play tennis might not matter but it’s not usually considered odious.
But why is dishonesty (or cheating) usually considered bad? It’s because the cheater expends effort to divert resources from others to himself — effort that could better have been spent improving the world. That seems to apply equally to sports competition.
Likewise Gene Callahan (#10):
But cheating is a *negative-sum* game: it is zero-sum between the cheater and the losers due to the cheating, but if successful, dishonesty is rewarded, and society as a whole suffers.
Sports competition is a negative sum game in exactly the same way and for exactly the same reason—effort is expended to *transfer* wealth when that same effort could have been employed to *create* wealth.
Bernie Madoff works hard to transfer money from other people’s pockets to his own. A tennis star works hard to transfer rewards (including, say, a college admissions slot) from others to himself. In what way is one of these more or less admirable than the other?
Steve (or onlookers who get it), are you making an analogy with the recent college cheating scandal? Or is this your direct view, about college sports?
Bob Murphy: I’m not completely sure I understand your question but the motivation for the post was this:
1) We have this big scandal. People are upset. I was musing on why, exactly, people find this so upsetting.
2) It seemed to me that ultimately people are upset by cheating largely because it is a waste of resources (as is any investment in winning a zero sum game).
3) This led me to wonder why the same instinct doesn’t make people feel equally upset about the ongoing zero sum game that is the competition for college sports scholarships.
Is it possible that a factor in the current scandal is that the offenders are rich / privileged, whereas sports scholarship winners are typically from the other end of the socio-economic spectrum, and so the outrage contains a component of this factor.
However, well thought-out, planned dishonesty meeting the definition of fraud seems to signal a far more harmful member of society (which relies so much on trust / exchange etc), than someone who happens to excel at some random game, or even someone who (with full knowledge of everyone else) practices to excel at that game.
@ Steve 15
Motivation or perceived motivation might come into it? It’s easy enough to start playing tennis/soccer/football because you think it’s fun, good exercise or social. OK little Bobby does this in 2nd grade and realises in 10th grade that this might be something to focus more on for a bit as it could help his college prospects. That’s at least a plausible story people might have in mind.
On the other hand no one starts out paying large bribes to coaches or SAT administrators or doctoring yearbook photos because it seems like a fun, social activity that’s good exercise.
In these hypotheticals the actual athlete looks like he got lucky and wasn’t really thinking about diverting anything to himself (although that’s an upshot) whereas the faker does look like he’s going in hoping to screw someone over.
Another difference if that if you and I start a college and accept people based on something like juggling ability, one could reasonably say “that’s weird but your college do what you want”, now if someone fakes being a juggler, they haven’t just diverted resources from a real juggler to themselves, they’ve also fed us false info. Maybe some people are fine with colleges having whatever silly criteria they like but not ok with applicants hurting the colleges by giving them false info.
SL:
It’s because the cheater expends effort to divert resources from others to himself — effort that could better have been spent improving the world. That seems to apply equally to sports competition.
College alumni and people in general enjoy watching and participating in college sports, so it’s not really zero-sum. For the college itself, they’re a huge stream of revenue. A cheater provides none of that.
Athetes participating in sports that make money for the school makes sense, but crew? Lacrosse?
#3
” but the only way for them to *experience* that joy is from knowing that everyone got on those sports teams by out-competing everyone else….but we’d eliminate 90% of the waste. However, a lot of people probably wouldn’t enjoy the games any more.”
The trouble is we are talking about college sports here, which are not the “best of the best” but already starting from a restricted pool. Over here, the under 21 England football team (soccer) gets much less attention than the “full” game, despite England doing much better in the under 21 recently. This is at least in part because the spectators are aware they are not watching the best available players. Presumably better standard of play is available in the professional game than the college game. I don’t see that much difference between restricting the field to college students or to 10% of college students, once we have abandoned the idea that we are watching the best possible.
This does raise the question why people enjoy watching sport at all? Many parents can derive as much enjoyment watching their children playing a game than watching the much better professional players. These games can be just as full of tension and excitement, although the technical standard is much worse. The parents have an emotional attachment to the players and this provides the necessary pre-requisite for enjoying the game. Most other people are not very interested in watching a bunch of 10 year olds kick a ball around. How do people get that emotional attachment to either professional teams or college teams? It is presumably in part down to shared experience. The team is an expression of the fan’s sense of self. There may be benefits. “This model, labeled the Team Identification-Social Psychological Health Model, predicts that team identification facilitates well-being by increasing social connections for the fan.”
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232425769_Understanding_the_positive_social_psychological_benefits_of_sport_team_identification_The_team_identification-social_psychological_health_model
In principle, any allegiance could do the same job. In most of the world these is no allegiance to college teams. People often support their local professional team. The conditions are presumably that there must be a certain number or proportion of people who are involved in watching the same sport. Once these things become established it will be difficult to change, as the thing to which people are attached is to a large extent arbitrary and the main criterion is the number of people who are doing it.
On the wider point, I don’t think anyone is suggesting that getting college admittance is not of benefit to the student. The question is whether it benefits anyone else, or is of benefit generally. It is rather daft to say that sports achievement is a good proxy for say, maths ability. We have maths test scores for that.
Membership of sporting teams may be reasonable supporting evidence for an application, as would charity work, or other interests. That is a far cry from granting a place based only on the sporting achievement.
SL: “2) It seemed to me that ultimately people are upset by cheating largely because it is a waste of resources (as is any investment in winning a zero sum game).”
Not only that. People have a strong sense of fairness, and other apes will forgo rewards if the perceive they are being treated unfairly.
Steve,
Oops, I hadn’t read much on the college cheating stuff before my original comment above. I didn’t realize at the time that the fake sports history was part of it. So now I totally get your post.
To understand your position, let me ask this: Do you think the Super Bowl is a zero-sum game?
I find it odd that you consider sports a zero-sum activity. People love sports, which can be inferred both from their revealed preferences – they practice and watch it for pleasure all the time and spend a lot of money on it – and their stated preferences – people say they love sports.
Sports teams build a sense of community, something that people also value a lot and psychological research associates with mental health.
It is definitely the case that these healthy practices may suffer from perverse incentives and eventually become unhealthy, which may be argued about sports in colleges today (though I am agnostic on the issue).
While I wouldn’t characterize sports in general as a zero-sum game (OK, they really ARE zero-sum games, as games go, but the enjoyment of the spectators and the demonstration of skill and discipline of the participants surely have some positive value that extend beyond the sport results themselves), their importance in college are very much an American thing. Many colleges actually arrange for a parallel achievement track to induct young athletes into professional sports that excuse them from actually competing academically (or so the story goes).
In Germany, people follow the sport team (OK, mostly the soccer team!) of their town, and maybe of their area, but nobody associates the sports with particular schools.
Here, people take the sports teams of some colleges (I don’t think the U of R is actually competing in that field, I think the only “local” University that really counts here is Syracuse) very seriously. There is a feeling that sports success motivates fund raising among alumni. There is a socially accepted procedure of succeeding in this arena. Violating that procedure apparently seems just a little more evil than bribing the admissions people in the socially acceptable way.
I don’t really understand it myself, but I think it is one of those Elephants in the Brain that Robin Hanson writes about…a certain about of hypocrisy is not only accepted here but almost required.
Tiago, following up from my comment above, your comment mentions some of the same points.
People love sports, but why would it matter which sport or at what level? They could derive the same satisfaction in principle from any sport – as long as enough people share that interest.
In the USA, do people support their local college team and a professional team? How does it work? According to Wiki “Unlike in the rest of the world, in the United States today, many college sports are extremely popular on both regional and national scales, in many cases competing with professional championships for prime broadcast, print coverage and for the top athletes.”
Presumably, the college teams are not as good as the professional teams, yet support is similar. Or are they as good? Either way is odd If college teams are as good, they shouldn’t be because the pool is (or would be expected to be) restricted. If they are not as good, how do we explain a similar level of sport, if excellence is one of the key aspects of sport fandom?
Last line should be similar level of support.
Playing sports allegedly signals prospective employers that a candidate is a “team” player and can think on his feet. I used to work at a firm where college varsity athletes were highly prized regardless of their major and experience. In reality, it is intellectual prowess and adaptability that employers should seek.
I disagree that it’s zero sum. Good players playing each other and bad players playing each other both have winners and losers but the value to everyone else watching is very different.
Scholarships for great players that fill arenas are a bargain
Pat ” but the value to everyone else watching is very different.
Scholarships for great players that fill arenas are a bargain.”
Sorry to bang on too much, but this is what I don’t get about college sports, possibly because I am not familiar with it, so perhaps someone could explain.
How good are college teams compared to the professional teams? My assumption is that they are not as good, in which case the enjoyment people get from spectating cannot be due to the excellence of the players.
Harold 30
Many of the most popular college sports teams with the biggest attendance are in areas where there isn’t a professional team nearby. Colleges in a pro sports towns often struggle filling seats (Pitt and BC football come to mind.) It’s not all about the quality of the players, there is some component of this that is just loyalty to the school (schools with lots of alumni nearby draw well). Even in those cases, I don’t see it as zero sum because there are other entertainment options other than college sports people might substitute.
Thanks
I think college sports compare to the Olympics. The athletes going to Olympic games are technically supposed to be amateurs, so that is also a second-tier pool. Yet, participants and spectators are pretty serious about them. The Olympic Basketball tournament, for instance, seems almost as big a deal as the domestic playoffs. Some fans take college sports about that seriously. This is just based on comments I hear from friends, and the tone and quantity of sports-related articles I see in newspapers, magazines or blogs (None of them specifically about sports. Just for the record).
@Jonathan Pine 28.
How’d that employer feel about people who’d played individual sports in college (wrestlers, tennis players, gymnasts)? Just curious here.
#33 ” The athletes going to Olympic games are technically supposed to be amateurs, so that is also a second-tier pool.”
I think for most sports/athletics this is not serious any more. I mean, who won the tennis men’s golds? Not really an amateur. (It was Andy Murray.) Who won the 100m?
For soccer and some other sports where there is a global competition for professional game, the Olympic teams are restricted- for soccer it is under 21 except for 3 players. However, Olympic soccer is not taken very seriously compared to the world cup.
I think the more “second tier” the competition, the less interest, but I may be wrong. I am sure there are exceptions, basketball and ice hockey perhaps? I am sure I heard a lot about USA vs USSR or Russia in ice hockey, but I don’t know how the Olympic teams are restricted. These sports are little played over here so I don’t know much about them. Although having a quick look at Wikipedia I see “In April 1989, through the leadership of Secretary General Borislav Stanković, FIBA approved the rule that allowed NBA players to compete in international tournaments, including the Olympics.”
Gene Callahan: “… if it is not successful, … the cheater is now tossed out, the press spends a bunch of time discussing the scandal… even more negative-sum!”
The press – teevee news – has been commingled with entertainment
for a very long time. And in wealthy countries, there is unlimited
demand for entertainment. Thus market economics implies the time spent chewing on this scandal is presumably positive sum –
Henri Hein: “As an immigrant, I was as surprised as Jenny about the American obsession with school sports.”
The waters here are deeper than you realize –
For 200 years, thanks to industrialization, enabled by massive CO2 combustion, we’ve been on a prosperity rocket ship, each generation leaving the succeeding one wealthier; first Great Britain, then USA, lately Asia.
Now here we are, the grandchildren, enjoying the fruits of all that labor and investment. In what manner? Through endless amusement and recreation. Is that a bad thing? Isn’t that what our granddads worked for?
https://thefederalistpapers.org/founders/adams/john-adams-letter-to-abigail-adams-12-may-1780-2
One way that manifests is our obsession with school sports.
However, another, quite different analysis is also reasonable, and more common: the school sports thing is a sign of decay, we’re heading down the same sinkhole as every other empire of history. Too much time and money spent playing, not enough working, we’re eating our seed corn, the future ain’t what it used to be! Meanwhile, watching China and Korea and Singapore as the new rising stars, with their kids hitting the books.
Time will tell –
@Harold, #35:
I think you are largely correct. I was trying to address your question, “How good are college teams?” and your implied question, “how serious are Americans about college sports?” Saying “about as good, and about as serious, as other countries’ Olympics participants” may not be spot on, but I think it gets close.
@Richard D, #37:
Or neither. USA can certainly afford both pom-poms and in-classroom computers. It is nevertheless a cultural curiosity.
Henri Hein: “… I don’t see the sports star trajectory translating to other areas of life.”
My experience differs – it often does translate.
I have in mind in particular, the wrestlers. Peak talents, but also strong work ethic – no one sweats more in training. And in business, I’ve seen wrestlers excel time and again, for that very reason. I’m biased in their favor, in hiring decisions.
Swimmers also, strong self-discipline. Perhaps others, I’m not sure. I’d rate these higher than footballers or basketballers, character-wise.
Thus we have the signaling model. Which means the athletes have a big stake in protecting their reputations, hence self-policing against fraud.
Harold #33: There are also college sports/teams that are decidedly *not* second tier. I recall reading in Sports Illustrated in ( I believe) the 70s of a U.S. Midwestern college swim team that, based on personal best times, would have defeated *the rest of the world combined* in a standard college swim meet. I don’t recall the school and would be interested If anyone can help with the details.
Richard D. #40 — thanks I may have to relay this sentiment to the youth wrestling team I coach :)
Seems like the whole issue is just how “largely irrelevant” these qualities are (compared to every other thing people do to flesh out their resumes, including of course the pure signaling value of attending college in the first place).
That said it’s an open question why sports need be attached to schools. They do often seem like a diversion from the schools’ “real” mission (at least for non-revenue-generators which the vast majority of programs are).
Some of this is explained by the size of the USA. In the UK we have 92 professional football teams divided into 4 divisions. You are never far from a team in the football league. You are never that far from a top or second tier team. Even fourth tier teams can afford to travel the whole country to play in a national league. Below this the leagues are split regionally.
The NFL has 32 teams, covering an area many times the size of the UK. Presumably you could find yourself a long, long way from a “local” team to support. Lower division teams could not afford to compete in a national league, as they do in the UK and most European countries.
We have seen that sports fans get benefits from supporting a team and the social bonds that result. This means some other level of sports is needed in the USA that does not compare to Europe. This did not have to be college sports, but it has ended up being that. I think I understand it much better now. If my analysis s correct that is.
I sense that many people feel that this admissions scandal reflects a blow against meritocracy. But this begs the question: Who defines merit?
Sports stars demonstrate that they can excel at the ability to compete according to some known but arbitrary criteria—and cheaters demonstrate that they can excel according to some unknown, but perhaps less arbitrary, criteria. Which demonstration is more likely to be applicable to a broader context?
Indeed, how different are these types of success? Many sports involve deception—head feints, hidden balls, trick plays. Both basketball and soccer train players to exaggerate (or perhaps invent?) harms they suffer from an opposing player’s errors (“flopping”) as a means of attracting a penalty call from a referee—cheating? Rather than fighting toe-to-toe with George Foreman, Mohammad Ali adopted a rope-a-dope strategy—cheating? During the last summer Olympics, multiple badminton teams actively tried to lose as a strategy to manage their assent in the rankings while delaying a head-to-head contest against the Chinese team (I think)—cheating? Some hockey players basically feint playing hockey; their real purpose is to physically assault the players of other teams—cheating? What about teams that send spies to observe other team’s games? Other team’s practices? Other team’s efforts to send secret signals from coaches to players, or between players? What about teams that realize that they can’t make it into the playoffs, and therefore sell off their best players in order to amass cash for the next year? What about teams that realize they can’t make it to the playoffs, and therefore intentionally lose games in the hope of improving their ranking for the following year’s player draft?
Imagine you’re a boss deciding which job candidate to hire. One candidate excelled at running. Another candidate succeeded because she had rich parents who had demonstrated that they would spare no expense to ensure their daughter’s success. Which person had demonstrated a greater likelihood of success in the workplace?
1. I wonder. Basketball provides a huge advantage for tall players. I would not be surprised to learn that as a practical matter, easily 90% of the population is too short to have a realistic chance at becoming a professional basketball player—yet people seem to enjoy watching the games.
Let me state this more clearly: Abnormal height is virtually a requirement for having a successful professional career—yet I know of no one who has achieved abnormal height via effort or other manifestations of merit. Yet that doesn’t seem to impair anyone’s enjoyment of the game.
And if we can acknowledge the function of height in basketball, now ponder the function of gender in neigh unto all sports. The vast majority of professional athletes are male. And this fact doesn’t seem to impair people’s enjoyment of games.
And if we can acknowledge the function of gender in sports, now ponder the function of gender in most other areas of life. For most of history, a male gender was required for success on almost any public endeavor.
2. Nonetheless, people profess different reasons for admiring sports. Some claim to admire hard work and dedication. Others fans claim to admire skill and athleticism and artistry.
In 1958 Jules Feiffer published a short story for them in Sports Illustrated. Harold Swerg was so good at sports … that they bored him. People implored him to join their teams, but he had no interest.
Then the Olympics arrived, and people insisted that Swerg compete for his country against the Soviets. So Swerg agreed to put on his greatest display of sports mastery. The Soviet athletes went first. And then, whatever those athletes had been able to achieve … Swerg matched exactly. Exactly same speed, same height, same distance. People decried Swerg’s poor sportsmanship for not “giving his all.” But Swerg explained that matching what these other athletes had done DID take his all; indeed, has wasn’t sure he’d be able to do it, and was quite pleased with his success.
But few other people were pleased. Sure, Swerg had demonstrated hard work and dedication; he had demonstrated skill and athleticism and artistry. But unless all of that was served up with a heaping helping of tribal dominance, nobody gave a shit.
The first name is obviously a good choice, but why Swerg? Is there a hidden meaning?
On the enjoyment of sports, it seems the principle benefit people get from spectating or supporting is a membership of a community (in very rough terms). The community can coalesce around anything that seems to have a critical mass of acceptance. So it doesn’t have to be the best, as long as the reasons for it not being seem to be reasonable to the supporters.
It is considered acceptable to reject 90% of the population for not being tall enough, since that also makes them not as good at basketball. It is not considered acceptable to restrict basketball players if 90% are arbitrarily prevented from taking part.
There does not seem to be any fundamental reason why this should be the case – it is just what enough people will accept.
Take women’s football during WWI. The FA stopped holding competitions because the men were away fighting. Women teams were started and became very popular. Over 54,000 went to see Dick, Kerr ladies at Goodison Park in 1920.
In the absence if Men’s teams for good reason, people were happy to coalesce around Women’s football teams. Their popularity continued after the war, so much so the FA banned them. My assertion is that what is taken up by supporters is to an extent arbitrary. If we could persuade the populace that restricting the people available to play basketball to a random 10% of the population I think the supporters could get just as much out of it.