Title IX Shenanigans, with a Michigan cameo
Women’s Rowing
Wouldn't you rather add Women's Polo?
Is this supposed to be a scandal or something?
Yep, and they'll be up a creek without a paddle.
Schitt's Creek?
It's manipulating statistics to break at least the spirit of federal law, so yeah.
How is it manipulating numbers? They're still giving out scholarships, providing facilities, training and academic support to the athletes as they would for any other athlete.
Exactly!! Title IX ensures there are equal scholarships available to men and women. Schools that have Football (and wrestling where applicable) have to find women’s scholarships to equal things out.
Wisconsin can have 12,000 on their women’s rowing team but they only get credit for the number of scholarships — of which I would guess there are some restrictions on a sport by sport basis.
The M women’s varsity waterpolo and volleyball teams also exist solely for title IX purposes - (or conversely this is why there are not varsity men’s teams in those sports.)
People can dislike the rule but there is nothing wrong with how schools are implementing it.
The Title IX statute does not actually "ensures that there are equal scholarships available to men and women" as you assert. You can look it up, but for everyone's benefit I'll copy it here:
20 U.S. Code § 1681
No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance, except that:
I think enlightenedbum has the right idea - the spirit of the law is to eliminate discrimination. The operation of the law has required equal numbers of scholarships to prove non-discrimination, but not all scholarships, or benefits of the educational program, are equal. As I've said elsewhere in the thread, I don't really consider a freshman girl who barely participates on the rowing team to be getting the same benefit of the opportunity as pretty much any football or men's basketball player.
I don't really blame the schools very much in this case, they are doing what they have to to meet a somewhat arbitrary standard of equal numbers of men and women athletes. But I think you can have more men than women participating without being discriminatory, and I think you can discriminate while still having equal participation (if the men get the best facilities while women are stuck with crap, for example). The spirit of the law is a qualitative, not quantitative determination, and to reduce it to simple numbers of athletes and proportions of dollars is far from an ideal solution.
What's the complaint then? That women get a scholarship but don't have the same chance to compete at the top level? If that's the complaint, then what is the alternative?
I thought my last paragraph addressed the complaint, and the whole point of the article: not all athletic participation is the same, yet schools are treating it that way in order to look like they're complying with Title IX, when the reality is they may or may not be.
The alternative is to fix the test that requires equal participation, and instead look at other measures of whether discrimination on the basis of sex is occuring.
I posted that comment before people pointed out that these are not scholarship numbers. Your answer makes more sense, but how Title IX is even more arcane to me now.
Women's Football
I could be wrong, but I believe I've read the law has been interpreted to mean the scholarships must be in proportion to the ratio of men to women in the overall student population of the school. The law does not state that, but over time that's how it's been interpreted and applied. Any Title IX lawyers here?
You're exactly right. Quick civics lesson: Congress creates a law that basically says: don't discriminate on the basis of sex. Executive branch (Dept. of Education) enforces that and comes up with rules to determine if a school is following the law or not. If the DoE or an individual believes that a school is breaking the law, it goes to court. The judicial branch interprets the cases that come before it, and determine whether or not they did, and in the process create their own set of tests that schools have to follow to stay on the good side.
Rowing has 20 full scholarships at the Division I level. It's an equivalency sport so you can partial that money out, but I feel confident that not all 176 women on the Wisconsin rowing team are getting scholarship money.
These teams are basically recruiting novice women on campus to be on the team until the first competition when the numbers actually count. I would be stunned if there are 176 women on the team at the end of the season. The tactic is clearly being used to violate the spirit of Title IX regulations.
Athletic departments have always desired to find a women's sport that would be somewhat equivalent to football in terms of squad numbers. Rowing must be the closest thing they could find.
Even if it is “manipulating” it’s doing so in favor of opportunities for women athletes. Without Title IX they wouldn’t be offering these scholarships at all (or certainly not in these numbers).
And FTR, nobody is forcing those women to accept full ride scholarships to schools with crowded rosters.
Yeah, at best, this is an “odd consequence” rather than some sort of scandal. Plus, parents have long known that they can get their daughters into good schools by having them focus on more obscure sports
By the way, how’s the abduction coming along?
I'll ask the guy who hacked my account.
Lol it may also be prudent to see if your wife is still there
They aren't getting full rides. It's just if they offer 150 athletic opportunities for men, they have to offer the same amount to women.
Did I miss that in the article? If that's the case then what is the 85 scholarship limit in football in relation to Title IX?
The article doesn't say the word "scholarship" at all. The scholarship limit in football was imposed following Title IX in order to make sure schools had money available to support the women, from what I've learned after a quick Google. But it seems like the Title IX reasoning is now incidental to the limit being used to enforce parity across college football, and prevent big schools from hoarding talent.
The article doesn't say they're giving out scholarships to all the women on the team, just that they are listing them for participation. This website says that 20 scholarship-equivalents is the max per team, and the high for number of scholarships is 51. Which means that at Wisconsin, 100+ girls listed on their team are not on scholarship at all. And I would be suspicious that all 176 of them are really getting the most out of the training and academic support that all other athletes get.
Then I'm even more confused. I've always believed that the 85 scholarship limit in football was due to the fact that there is a Title IX mandate that you must have an equal number of men and women scholarship athletes. Afaik there are no limits to how many walk ons a team can have. So what does this have to do with Title IX?
I believe a Division I roster can have a maximum of 105 players with a maximum of 85 on full scholarship.
I'm pretty confused by all of this as well, but finding some resources online that are helping. I just read http://titleixspecialists.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Q-A-Three-Part-Test.pdf, which explains the participation test. It's not about counting scholarships, but rather making sure you have enough participants, whether on scholarship or not, to meet test one, the proportionality test.
The logic here could never be condensed into a Tweet or a bumper sticker so it would never stick with the general public.
Is it still creating an opportunity for women athletes that would not exist but for Title IX?
Yes it is still creating opportunities that would not exist but for Title IX. But I don't think with or without Title IX should be the standard. We should strive for better rules that are actually effective in maximizing the opportunity for all athletes, men and women. Right now the incentives caused by somewhat arbitrary "balance" rules are causing schools like Michigan to count plenty of women as participants when their level of participation is dubious at best, meanwhile the men's rowing team cannot go varsity since the AD would have to find that many more women participants.
In 1972, Title IX was absolutely necessary. It changed the culture in this country and gave opportunities to millions of women that would not have received it from the old boys culture of athletics. But I think now it's fair to ask if the rules should be refined, without scrapping the law, to reflect the needs of the men and women who are in high school and college today.
If you read the article it says nothing about scholarships. Little hard to believe that all those rowers would be on scholarship.
Pretty sure it’s % of women in a varsity sport compared to % of women enrolled in the school, they are not giving out 150 rowing scholarships.
So tell us how else you would do it. What other women’s sports would you add, or what other men’s sports would you cut, to achieve the mandated balance?
Women’s football would seem like an obvious addition
I’m not going to disagree, but can you identify any existing NCAA sport that isn’t at least reasonably present at the high school level (whether school sponsored or not)?
When Title IX compliance became a big deal, cutting men's sports was the original answer. Men's wrestling got decimated 20-30 years ago--a men's sport with some decent squad numbers that, most felt, wasn't going to be missed. At some point though women's sports have to get added to make the numbers work (women's lacrosse, women's hockey, rowing, etc.)
August 4th, 2019 at 10:00 PM ^
Wisconsin is not having a good week with Title IX problems.
First Cephus, their star WR, gets exonerated and not found guilty for rape against 2 females at UW. That's going to be a fat lawsuit against the university for expelling him with kangaroo court bullshit.
I assumed most people know this about the W Crew teams. They are the teams that balance the 85 football players.
Most of that roster are in actually club team players but show up as the 8th stringer for the 3rd boat on the 4-man boat intercollegiate roster.
I may have missed it, but I didn’t see the women’s numbers compared to men’s roster sizes. I went to undergrad at one of the schools on the list. I distinctly remember freshman, guys and girls a like, joining rowing because it was the easiest way to become a D-1 athlete. You get the gear and the experiences (most important part) without the same entry barrier as the other D-1 sports.
Men’s and women’s rowing both had inflated rosters because there weren’t any tryouts. Maybe it was different for me because there technically weren’t athletic scholarships and there were a ton of varsity teams
You can't just throw out arbitrary numbers that you expect the schools to meet in the name of equality, and then get mad about how they have to manipulate the numbers to get compliant.
Football automatically skews the numbers, and there is no other sport on the women's side that would be able to balance that other than rowing. If you take out the crew "loophole," you would have to add 5 more women's programs to match the football roster.
Exactly. Any school that has the same number of men’s and women’s sports, is fudging numbers somewhere. Mostly because it’s unrealistic to somehow attribute 85 scholarships to women’s sports without, as you said, adding a significant amount of women’s sports and the operating in the red (which most schools are already doing at this point)
Just add women's football.
I have always wanted to row because of how good a workout it would be, even looked into buying a rowing machine. These schools now have a lot of women with insanely strong backs.
FWIW I remember more than a few people I knew who "rowed" on the women's crew team at Michigan, none of whom seemed to be particularly adept or experienced rowers for a D1 school, and none of whom stayed on the team for more than a year or two, if that.
The gist seemed to be that they'd bring in tons of freshmen as walk-ons, many of whom were retreads from other high school varsity sports who were thought to have the physique and stamina to row, and who then would figure out pretty quickly that they really weren't up for all that went into it and fall away.
Is there something nefarious there? I don't know, it didn't strike me as that. But it seemed to be a pretty large program for what most would describe as a pretty niche sport.
For the freshman girls who walk on to the rowing team, stick with it and get the full varsity experience, I would argue that the spirit of Title IX is working for them. They got an opportunity they otherwise probably would not have gotten, and took advantage. For the rest, the young women who essentially serve as fillers to meet the quota, I don't see how that is progress toward a goal of equal opportunities for the women. Especially since, as you say, they generally come from other sports in high school - they would be better served in their athletic endeavors if Michigan had sponsored their sport (though hockey is the only sport I know of that is NCAA sponsored but not a U-M).
Other NCAA sports: Fencing (OSU, ND, and PSU, PSU has the most overall national championships in the B1G because of their fencing program), Shooting (OSU has a team), skiing, bowling and rodeo off the top of my head, Interestingly, athough MSU droped men's fencing to make the numbers for Title IX the NCAA national championships are combined score, not men's and women's championship
Your friends were not the norm compared to my experience. I was friends with a few of the women on crew; they were pretty serious about it and stayed on the team 4 years. They had all rowed in high school and in some cases were recruited to Michigan from Canada for''' crew, some went on to the olympic training teams, etc. They tended to be really good students as well.
And yet Michigan finished 3rd place nationally, won the B1G and went 36-3 in 2018-19.
Not to mention built a first of its kind (among college teams) indoor rowing facility.
We don't just have rowing to balance out scholarships. We invest in the program and are the best in the B1G.
