30 Year Return on Student Athletes
I was on Irish Envy just now (laughing at their comments about Jabrill Peppers)and ran across a spreadsheet that one of their mods put together. The spreadsheet appears to cover african american student athletes at major colleges over a 30 year period, and covers the returns the colleges get for those athletes. I'm apparently not smart enough to figure out how one would get this information. That being said, I was hoping you fine folks on Mgoblog could explain it. I find it hard to believe that Michigan would rank so lowly on a list such as this.
Here's the original source as well.
I see NDNation and "delusional" in the same comment, but you don't seem to be using one to refer to the other. NDNation is worse than the RCMB, except that everything there is covered in a veneer of smug elitism.
So, if I am reading this spreadsheet and this article right, they have taken the "30-year ROI including aid for graduates only", which is not 100% anyway, then added the average aid to that figure as well as the net cost to graduate. They've doubled up on aid here basically, so already the figure is bad. Keep in mind that ROI is basically (Gain - Cost)/Cost. These are numbers for degrees, not athletics, so unless there is a football major, I don't know if you can generalize like this person seems to be doing.
They have then taken this figure and multiplied the graduation rate for football players by a number which already is an adjusted figure and come up with a number depicting football players with less ROI than "typical students", if you will. A cursory delve into marketing, enhanced ticket sales and other items tied to the success of athletic programs would show, I believe, that for some players, the ROI for school is quite high and, post college, the ROI for individual players can be quite high too. As it was based on pay, a cursory look at what football players make versus what the typical student just graduating might make echoes the problem in the assumptions of this spreadsheet.
He's taking figures that are calculated based on the whole student body and generalizing that the same formulas (in his case, the strange and incorrect application of formulas) can be applied to student-athletes. I don't think this is true necessarily.
that uses self-reported data from PayScale (big flag #1)
Article : http://www.businessweek.com/interactive_reports/colleges_return_on_investment.html
Methodology : http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-04-09/measuring-college-roi
There's a lot of areas to poke holes here but the two biggest
1) They are assuming that Student Athlete ROI = Regular Graduate ROI
2) They are adjusting the ROI by the GSR to try to split the difference between White and Black athletes. Not only is this a stupid way to go about estimating this, the orgiinal Methodology uses GSR to calculate the original number, so they are double counting this metric.
Generally speaking, the schools that do the best in these analyses tend to do have a have a higher % of students in STEM+Business majors. All this really shows is that is ND has a lot of those guys (as a % of student population), which makes sense since Michigan offers a much wider breadth of study areas.
For their insight, I think I've got a much better understanding of it now.
Happy others noticed the issues with the link. It looks more "official" because of the nice charting and breadth of schools, but it doesn't tell me much. At best, it coarsely confirms that schools with good academics and a strong presence in money-making fields produce athletes with better post-football career opportunities compared to other schools, but I doubt that was much of a debate point for people.
The only thing that would impress me off that spreadsheet is the Grad Rates. 93% white folks, 100% black folks.
Schools like Oklahoma should be ashamed of themselves and need to be penalized if these kids are truly students first, you know, like the NCAA says they are.