Define Equity, Title IX

I laughed at this:

Walk-ons don't travel with the team. They don't get financial support. They just show up and fail to kick balls through the uprights.

but then realized that it also needed to say "or start at safety as a redshirt freshman" and wept for our cursed secondary.

I played Basketball in college. We were D3 but very sucessful. Went to
The Final 4 my fresh year and had won back
To back Nat Champ in the years previous. My relevance to this story.....

Our practice team consisted of male students. They learned the opposing teams offense. It gave us a distinct advantage. I don't know how they were counted. I didnt care. It helped is be a better program. It was not a disservice, it was a leg up.

This also brought with it a stronger fan base. These practice members were the
Core and grew our 6th man club, an over the top fan
Base.

The investment line works fine for Michigan, but what about all the non BCS schools who are bleeding money out of their eyeballs and are extremely unlikely to see a payout?

They aren't amateur and the people playing them are primarily athletes, not college students. The problem is that if you cut them loose from the athletic department, then logic says that you should cut them loose from the university altogether. What's their educational purpose again?

Men's football and basketball could be required to break even, and the university take independent responsibility non-revenue sports. Then it would be feasible for Title IX to be enforced for non-revenue sports. Of course, some of the football and basketball programs would die, but wouldn't that increase competitiveness?

I don't know what the research says now, but I do know that the last time I looked, the vast majority of Division I athletic departments got subventions from their universities, and quantifiable benefits from increased exposure and increased alumni giving weren't evident. If that's the case, women who don't bring in money and men who don't bring in money should be supported equally.

By the way, there are more women in college now than men. Not sure how that figures into things.

At what point do you all think women's sports would have enough cultural momentum to be taken off the life support of Title IX?  A recurring theme in the comments here is the fear that things would go back to the way they were before Title IX if it were repealed or significantly amended.  For those with that fear...when does it subside?

that has had enormous effects, wanted and unwanted, across a very big board, no? You're muddying your message, Brian. 

The fact that women do not participate in the numbers men do does not mean greater equality of participation is not a worthy goal. Doesn't have to be equal--who cares--but most high and middle school educators will tell you about the desperate need to get kids, especially girls, moving. 

A broad-brush condemnation gets you nowhere, only prevents everyone seeing the more thoughtful fine print. Title IX isn't going away anyway, so rants (what this occasionally thoughtful screed dressed up as macho rant may elicit) are less than wutless. Problematic as it is, it has lifted womens' sports in a way that has enriched this country's u's.

Edit: one of the ways that I think we get confused, as fans, is in failing to distinguish our pleasure as consumers of the college sports spectacle with sports as participatory activity that schools offer kids as part of a college experience. They've ended up being pretty different animals. I love my hoops and football, but hint to me--as an educator, father, UM grad, etc.--that it's those activities that should suffer/lose support, when women got nothing routinely almost from the beginning, and sorry. . . The Times dangled the scandalous--just scandalous!--bit of info that guys were playing womens' sport to draw in readers to their (as often) botched piece, but from my pov they got the "protecting access to and boosting of women's sports" part mostly right.

[1] Accept that there will be 85 more men's sports' scholarships than women's at FBS schools, and 63 (aggregate) at FCS schools -- not sure about DII. 

[2] Mandate that existing women's programs don't get cut to pay for new men's programs, or something like that. I don't think it would be too terribly hard to develop a set of rules about what schools can and can't do as they transition toward a reformulated Title IX.

Should be abolished.

It's based on the invalid assumption that men and women are the same.  They are not.  They are different both physically and intellectually. That is a biological fact.  I'm not suggesting one gender is better either physically or intellectually - just different.  Not only do men and women have different athletic capabiliites, they also have different interest levels in athletics.  Treating them the same results in inequities favoring women.  Rather than a one-size fits all edict from the state, a more libertarian free market approach would be fairer.  Schools should be allowed to fund athletics for men and women based on demand from students and based on economic incentives.  If schools receive greater revenue from certain male or female sports, they should be free to fund these based on this economic reality.  If men or women demand greater athletic opportunities, they are free to attend the school which provides these opportunities.

Ok.  The close minded here are free to neg bomb.

I hate the New York Times... it is amazing how they are all about failing to see the facts and just making wild claims for page hits...

I think most reasonable people agree that Title IX is sort of screwed up, even if it did correct a flaw that existed at the time.

It's easy to poke holes in it, but I suppose the question is "what do you propose as an alternative?"

Ask Coach Hutchins what it was like to be a female college athlete before Title IX enforcement.

What I would like to see happen is the NCAA doing away with the terms Varsity and Club. Instead adopt revenue and non-revenue. Revenue sports are able to give scholarships just like they always have, because they make money. Non-revenue sports are not able to give scholarships because they do not make money. The schools have to offer the same nonrevenue sports it has in the past.

Non-revenue players are still able to compete for championships and are still able to offer the opportunity to play a college sport. If they meet academic scholarship requirements they can receive these and play, without counting against the athletic departments budget.

Does the law go further than just mandating that female athletes have the opportunity to play college sports? If not, this is a solution.

Why are NCAA sports any part of any educational institution's mission?

The reason we're talking about this right now is because the Commision on Civil Rights released recommendations last week that advocate using interest surveys to allow schools to reapportion and still meet a Prong Three standard of the regulation.

Before the law, athletic departments "figured" that men's sports were more important than women's, thus women's sports were given far, far, far less support, way out of whack with how many women actually wanted to compete, and the level at which they competed. Get rid of Title IX and you're basically sending women's sports back to 1960.

The law just says you can't discriminate. This is an important distinction because to change it doesn't need an Act of Congress; you need to get the Department of Education's Civil Rights Office to tweak the regulation.

The regulation is how the law is applied, and is retarded because it doesn't acknowledge that revenue sports are different, specifically that football will eat up half of the men's budget no matter which prong you're trying to meet. If you don't count football, schools can meet this easily. On the other hand it was created in the first place because schools used to put their football teams in gold chariots while giving out partial scholarships and 3-wheel carts to all of two girls teams.

We have lots of laws which in application treat different subsets of a regulated industry differently. We don't make dairy farmers, for example, control air pollution the same way we would a gas plant because it's not realistic to expect dairy farmers to get the cows to stop farting, for one, and two the scale is completely different.

I think the survey thing would help, and the Administration doesn't seem adverse to it, so we might see that implemented in as soon as a year. Another option is to provide a revenue apportionment based on ROI. You can't count TV exposure as ROI but that will play into schools' decision-making processes regardless. What you can do is exempt 1/2 of revenue brought in by a sport, so that apportionment of funding is more in line. It's still not "fair" but at least this would put women's sports and non-revenue men's sports on equal footing, and place revenue sports outside of that.

There's a pretty wide variety of data out there that women who play sports do better at getting to college, being succesful in college, and being successful after college.  I could give a shit about the financial costs, the mission is to educate people.  Title IX helps that in a variety of ways.  It can be tweaked to be less rigid so that in the name of equity we don't take away opportunities from non-revenue male sports (wrestling being the hardest hit, nationally) for the same reason, and I think exempting football is probably the easiest way to do that.

But calling it "futile" because of profitiability is ridiculous and beneath you, Brian.  It misses the core mission of universities.  Which is not to make fucking money.

The problem with articles like these is that the only effect they'll ever have is negative.  Suppose someone went to the worst offender, whether its USF or whoever but we'll say USF, and waved this article in their face saying, "you're cheating on Title IX, you're cheating female athletes, stop these accounting shenanigans or we'll sue."

Well, the staunchest Title IX defenders will say that schools aren't supposed to come into compliance with the law by cutting men's sports, ideally they're supposed to be doing it by increasing opportunities for women.  The problem is that only the government can spend money it doesn't have; everyone else has to find it somewhere.  That's how the real world works.  So USF looks at where it can spend money "correctly" and decides that money's going to have to come from men's sports because it can't come from other women's sports.

So the net result of the article is that just as many women are playing sports as before, and just as much money is being spent on women's sports because you can't round up a bunch of girls and force them to start fencing or swimming, but now there's no more men's soccer or wrestling or track or whatever and men have fewer opportunities.  But equality has been achieved!

That is the problem with Title IX and these wonderful exposés that purport to blow the lid off of unfair practices.  Fantasyland meets real world.  Title IX has done wonders for women's sports, fine.  Now it's a dinosaur.  Just because it served this wonderful purpose in the 70s doesn't mean it shouldn't be changed.  So did leaded gas.

i have to say i like how title IX works because it serves to keep the small schools without huge stadiums, tv deals, marketing, etc. down.  the money taken from football and basketball revenues at a small school is disproptionately larger than the money takem from big school since big school's revenue pot is much bigger.  it likely only takes michigan one home game to pay for south florida's entire athletic budget on tickets alone.

does this make me an asshole? maybe. am i an asshole who roots for the winningest team in college football history and not some glorified arena bowl team that plays in south nowhere and has a nonplural nickname and a congressperson that won't quit complaining about a level playing field? yes, i certainly am.

There are three ways a school can meet Title IX, established in '79. Any of the three will do:

1. Prong one - Providing athletic participation opportunities that are substantially proportionate to the student enrollment, OR
2. Prong two - Demonstrate a continual expansion of athletic opportunities for the underrepresented sex, OR
3. Prong three - Full and effective accommodation of the interest and ability of underrepresented sex.

Through the '80s, even under Reagan when Title IX wasn't enforced, most schools used Prong Two, because every school was slowly adding women's programs and could demonstrate that. The real ugliness began when the growth ended, between the early '90s and late '90s, when the cost of having a footbal and basketball team skyrocketed. Their revenues don't help them, so you end up with ludicrous spending disparities that basically null Prong One except for the uber-rich.

For Prong One, "substantially" is interpreted as "financially." Let USF demonstrate why that's not going to work for most schools:

Total Operating Expenses:

For the record, Michigan spends $33.7 million on men's sports and $15.2 million on women's sports. We could meet Prong 1 but that would mean spending what USF does on football, which would be silly because football operates at 190% profit not even counting the "everyone knows Michigan" factor it brings.

So right now schools meet it with Prong One using number of participants. Basketball helps because it's only a few players, but football is still the biggie.

However there's another Prong: "Full and effective accommodation of the interest and ability of underrepresented sex." How do you show this?

Recommendation for Fix:

Well, poll your student body to see how many of either gender want to play sports, then check that against the participation in your athletic programs. Gauge interest by two polls: one for incoming freshman added to the polls you have to take at the start of orientation, and one a random poll taken annually from the student body at large.

University of Nebraska Omaha, had to cut football and wrestling (3 time defending national champions) completely when moving to division one this year because we couldn't afford to comply with title IX

The current system really doesn't matter to me because I don't think any school should offer any scholarships to "athletes" who play sports with zero chance of playing professionally.  Let's be honest.  Football and basketball subsidize everything else.  Why should rich kids get into good school through the backdoor with lesser credentials playing some sport (for purposes of ease, let's call that sport "lacrosse") they have no shot of making a career of.  It's a waste of time.  The commitment required to play any sport on a D1 level is immense.  There's just no way you can get around the simple fact that someone who has more time to study is going to do better.  Look, I work out at a gym that produces a lot of D1 talent.  I understand the benefit of athletics, but only to a degree, only to the extent that it helps you focus.  When you spend too much time on it, with no benefit on the horizon, you're wasting your time.  At the end of the day, rich kids who never should have gotten in, except that they can play lacrosse or squash or field hockey or whatever, are the ones who are hurt by this.  When you mismatch students, the weaker ones will struggle, and they will struggle even more with a sports commitment.  If the NCAA really wanted to help kids, they should do away with all these useless addendums and just focus on the revenue sports.  At least with football and basketball (and to a lesser extent hockey and baseball), you can make the argument that providing a base education as a backup or addendum makes sense for those athletes. 

I worked my way up as a man through five sides of Michigan Rugby to a starting slot initially having zero knowledge of the game, as with majority students on the mens' rugby team.  Bo had rejected me for football despite my high school success.  Each Fall, we had at least 150 men competing for a slot on sides A-E under Ruf, Swanie and Perp The Almighty.  Our A Side was continually ranked #2 in the country yet we still had to sweep Crisler floors as a means to earn our travel money.  The Michigan women's rugby team, on the other hand, seldom could amass the minimum number to play a single match by a single side and therefore existed as forfeit queens, yet, they had better resources than we men and they received a varsity letter at one point in time despite their lack of success on the field.  This disparity was all due to the way by which the University administered title 9 at the time.  I hate it.  It cost my University recognition of many national titles and, eventually when Old Boys pulled out after time due to age, the rugby program frankly died.  This is what you want in the name of equality?