Documentation:
"How do sports influence the learning environment on a college campus?"
Comeaux, Eddie. "Black Males In The College Classroom: A Quantitative Analysis Of Student Athlete-Faculty Interactions." Challenge (1077193X) 14.1 (2008): 1-13. Academic Search Complete. Web. 2 Mar. 2016.
Exploration:
This article focused on black male athletes in the college classroom. College sports have moved past their original purpose of enhancing the classroom. They are now hindering athletes from receiving a valuable education and sports' purpose needs to be refocused. The label of student-athlete is perceived negatively, especially by faculty, resulting in a barrier. Black student athletes are victims of the dumb jock stereotype, creating detrimental effects on opportunities to learn. A sample of 739 black student athletes were surveyed. Many different independent variables were recorded. Pre-college variables' influences are presented when it seems they effected the outcome. There are interesting relationships when examined by input and environmental effects. High school GPA had the greatest effect on college GPA. Parents, their education, and their income seemed to have very little effect on college academics. Students who were encouraged to go to graduate school by staff did better academically in college. Black students at private schools had higher GPAs that ones at public schools. Lots of faculty interaction was insignificant because black students generally feel socially alienated on a white campus or black students are afraid they will be treated unfairly by faculty because of the stigma so they avoid interaction. This article gave many ideas for change. Schools should create various ways for communication and learning environments to accommodate needs of each specific student. Because it seems college students with a good high school GPA will be successful, high schools must get students ready for college. Colleges must learn to appreciate black athletes' situation and identify hindering factors. Faculty needs to understand prejudices of the black culture and resist those prejudices. The many factors and variables limited the study slightly.
This source shows the disadvantages that student athletes receive from faculty. Their stereotypes provide a disadvantage and hinders them from thriving in the university academic environment. Because this article mainly focused on black student athletes, it leads me to wonder what the relationship between faculty and white student athletes is like. I believe that the difference in the amount and quality of interaction is pretty large. Comeaux's solutions to student athlete's lack of success were interesting. I would like to hear other proposed ideas to give athletes the chance to succeed academically. I agree with the beginning of the source. Now that universities are making so much money from revenue producing sports like football and basketball, these student athletes are required to train and practice so much so they can be successful on the field and bring in more money to the school. This prevents them from spending as much time on their academics. The focus of universities seems to be on great sports programs, rather than trying to improve their academics for all their students. Also I found it interesting that there was a big influence from faculty members encouraging students to pursue graduate school. Maybe if one's academic future was brought up more, these student athletes would feel more encouraged to succeed academically. But this would cause them to do more school work which is close to impossible with the amount of sports work they do every week. This source slightly answers my original question. I am still curious on how the average student is influenced by a large sports presence on campus. I now know how black student athletes are influenced on campus though. Overall, the black stereotypes seem to play a large part in preventing black student athletes from having a much better opportunity to succeed academically and this is a social problem that is much bigger than one university.
Source 1 mentions that universities gain public relations benefits from successful athletics, while Source 2 mentions that "college athletics have become more commercialized with a greater urgency to produce winning season and secure corporate sponsors at the expense of the student-athlete's academic future." The conflict of these sources come down to this central debate. Is it more important for a university to make more money because of their successful sports team, or is it more important for a university to foster student's growth academically. Because the point of a university is to learn academics, I agree more with source 2. Universities need to refocus attention to student's academic success rather than having elite sports teams. If a school focuses instead on becoming an elite academic university, they would probably be able to change the public relations benefits with people who do not care about higher education to public relations with successful, rich scholars who will give money for the university to keep succeeding academically. Although a school might not be as commercially successful initially after emphasizing academics instead of sports, this change could pay off in the long run.
The synthesis makes me question which type of school is financially more successful: a sports power or a prestigious academic institute. I am also wondering about the influences of big sports on white college athletes and the average college student on campus. Right now, I can see that some of the public thinks that athletic success translates to academic success but that really only translates to public relations. I also see that black athletes are hindered in a college environment. This shows that it might be more important to focus on academics rather than athletic so more people can become educated, because people who were uneducated saw the link between sports and academics. I need to continue into the discussion of on campus influence of sports, either relating to psychology of athletes and learning environment.
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