OT: Kansas uses senior citizens to make sure athletes go to class

Submitted by Blue_Sox on

Interesting--and somewhat humorous--article from the Wall Street Journal about a new wrinkle to a pretty widely used strategy. I hadn't heard of this before, but athletic departments have long paid other students to follow around student-athletes to make sure they attend class. Problem with this is students can be rather impressionable when dealing with peers:

Case in point: former Jayhawk star Greg Ostertag ended up marrying one of the female students that had been hired to spy on him his freshman year. 

So now Kansas has turned to senior citizens to be on patrol and monitor with more of an iron fist. This has not been a flawless system either:

Being an elderly class checker does have some downsides. Senior moments can be inconvenient: Jerry Robinson, a 67-year-old retired child psychologist, says he has waited for hours outside eerily quiet classrooms only to realize later he was in the wrong building or had confused the days of the week.

There is also some debate over whether this is the best use of AD resources. Pretty interesting read overall. Anyone know if Michigan has a class-checking system like this? 

EDIT: Crap. I read the front page article earlier, but I guess I missed Brian linking this in the "Etc." section. Mods, delete please.

cclittle

February 8th, 2011 at 3:53 PM ^

So I'm TA'ing (that's GSI'ing in umich speak) intro classes at UNC, and I would appreciate this happening here.  The athlete watchdogs here are failrly young, and I've run into the problem of trying to hand them the assignment for the day when they're actually just looking for random football player who undoubtedly isn't in class.  Old people= less likely for me to mistake them for a student. 

JimBobTressel

February 8th, 2011 at 4:31 PM ^

Old Geezer: Boy!! You better hurry up to class!!

Athlete: I'm going, I'm going!

Geezer: Boy!!! Come here and push my scooter! The newfangled electric motorized motor gave out!

Athlete: But I'm gonna be late!

Geezer: PUSH ME *whacks kid with cane*

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

This is a great idea.

 

 

Geaux_Blue

February 8th, 2011 at 4:33 PM ^

i wouldn't be surprised if this idea of paying people to attend classes is closed bc it seems it could be portrayed as an unfair benefit. forced attendance under obvious monitoring is a benefit that other students don't receive, etc and so on. just a thought.

Geaux_Blue

February 8th, 2011 at 5:24 PM ^

this is allowable/acceptable because it is used as a counter to the amount of hours lost practicing. basically, and i'm making these numbers up, a player loses 20 hrs a week to football. being tutored 10 hrs a week compensates for these 20 hrs of lost studying opportunity. etc.  something like attendance, though, is not affected by practice theoretically. in reality, yeah, kids might miss 9 am classes bc practice rode them wet the night before. but i don't see what player sacrifice this combats.

SysMark

February 8th, 2011 at 7:19 PM ^

I can see that logic but to take it one step further, how does this apply to a student involved in a non-athletic extracurricular activity that takes up 20 hours, say a non-credit performing arts or engineering project?  They seem different at first blush but really are the same, the difference being the athlete is on scholarship.

The cynic would tha the athlete is in a revenue producing sport, but that still should not afford benefits not available to other students with similar time demands.

I'm assuming the answer is that the same tutoring services are available to all students, but in reality they are much more aggressively served to the athletes.

 

LSAClassOf2000

February 8th, 2011 at 6:09 PM ^

My grandparents would be perfect for this if they were still around. They would have been pretty old-school on these athletes. I have an image of my mother's dad threatening to ensnare the poor kid in the serpentine belt of his car and then rev it a few times, much  like he used to threaten the cats at his greenhouse.....