[edsg25]

Like it or not, our universities' basketball and particularly football programs add to there visibility and image and translate into positive academic gains for the institutions. one can lament this (and i can see good reason why), but it is hard to deny that it is true.

many of our elite universities used that very athletic success to build on their reputation.

MSU clearly is now one of the elite college football programs. It has been a basketball powerhouse for many years. and the school is getting a lot of attention, last week's Oregon-Michigan State game being a great example.

I saw that MSU has moved back into that vaunted "top 30" among public universities in USN&WR. Do you see MSU making academic gains and a increasingly higher academic reputation with the help of the Spartans success on the field (and court)?

[craig11152]

An interesting question. I will offer a couple random thoughts that don't exactly address your question

1. The list includes plenty of schools in the top 30 that are not exactly athletic powerhouses. Many have their moments here and there but are not consistent power houses.

2. Academic gains are partly fueled by applications. If you can only take 20-30% of total applicants you can pick and choose more stringently.

3. Is it a good thing for Michigan tax payers if MSU became like U of M? As it stands there are a lot of very qualified Michigan residents who can't get in the U of M because their GPA and SAT scores are the same as somebody from New York who will pay out of state tuition. Its a bit easier to get in to MSU and as tax payers "we the people" of the state own the University's.

[tuebor]

I'm not sure I understand the question. OP, are you equating "academic gains" with a higher ranking by USN&WR? I don't like quibbling over words, but improvements in the quality of education and research are what I would call "academic gains", whether or not they correlated with any improvement in somebody's ranking system.

If your question is whether elite athletic programs improve a university's overall USN&WR ranking, I would say that if they do, then that shows that USN&WR's methodology is probably flawed.

[edsg25]

Originally Posted by tuebor

I'm not sure I understand the question. OP, are you equating "academic gains" with a higher ranking by USN&WR? I don't like quibbling over words, but improvements in the quality of education and research are what I would call "academic gains", whether or not they correlated with any improvement in somebody's ranking system.

If your question is whether elite athletic programs improve a university's overall USN&WR ranking, I would say that if they do, then that shows that USN&WR's methodology is probably flawed.

no, i'm not. i am merely asking if the high profile of a school in the limelight due to its athletic success (spartan football) might translate into a higher achieving university. i say this in light of the fact that this has happened to numerous schools.

[tuebor]

In a very small number of schools, the athletic department brings in a net surplus in revenue, and maybe some of those dollars might find their way into supporting academically worthwhile pursuits. But overall, Division I college athletics is a blight on our higher education system and a colossal waste of resources that might truly translate into higher achieving universities, as you put it, if it were actually spent on education and research instead of sports.

Jim Moran says only 20 colleges make a profit from sports | PolitiFact Virginia

But of course Division I sports aren't going to go away any time soon. Given the present rotten system, can we find a correlation between high athletic achievement and high achievement in education and research? I doubt it. The most selective major research universities that produce the highest-achieving students and generate the most valuable research do not have high-performing Div. I athletics (not bothering to look it up but I'm guessing that Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Cal Tech, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and U of Chicago would all equal or exceed UM in those areas that constitute the real mission of a university).

I'm a proud Spartan, and my ears prick up every time research coming out of MSU is quoted on the news, etc. But I see no connection between the success of athletic teams and the success of MSU scientists or MSU's ability to fulfill its land-grant educational mission.