The High Cost of College Athletics

The vigorous protest from Yale against extravagant expenditures in college athletics has come not a moment too soon. It puts into plain language what the authorities of many other institutions have been thinking but have not ventured to speak aloud. Yale can utter this protest with good grace for she has not been by any means the worst offender.

The fact is that at practically all our colleges the passion for athletic victories has carried expenditures to an absurd length. Head coaches are sometimes paid more for their eight-weeks season than a college professor gets for his entire year's work. To help him the coach must also have a regular squadron of assistants trainers and other subordinates, all of them drawing good salaries. No wonder it costs more to put one football gladiator on the gridiron than the average student spends in a whole year at college. Yet some of the institutions which can afford to be so prodigal in coaching and coddling their athletic teams are the ones which cry out continually that they have not enough income to do their academic work properly.

The root of the trouble is not hard to find. The intense rivalry between the various colleges, the subordination of everything to the desire for teams which will win, these things have led to absurd competition in expenditures. It is like the race for armaments. The argument is that no team can hope to win unless it can be provided with all high priced coaching, scouting, dieting and other paraphernalia that its rivals are getting. To the progressive development of that absurdity, as the Yale report wisely points out, there is no end in sight. The time has surely come, therefore, for our colleges to agree upon a scheme of retrenchment. The chief evil of intercollegiate athletics at the present time is not their distractive effect upon study not their roughness, nor their promotion of bad feeling between rival institutions. In all these things there has been great improvement. The worst feature today is the excessively high cost of athletics and the pernicious example of prodigality which is thus held before the undergraduate's eyes. Boston Herald.