17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Convincing, June 20, 2004
A measure of the tortured relationship between higher education and sports is the fact that this is the second substantial book by William Bowen on this topic. The former President of Princeton and the present head of the Mellon Foundation, Bowen deployed the considerable resources of the Mellon Foundation to address this topic. The prior book, The Game of Life, was controversial because of conclusions that athletics have had a distorting effect on admissions and academic life at institutions thought to be free of the gross distortions seen at American Universities with scholarship driven athletic programs. After studying prestigious and very selective schools like the Ivy League universities and smaller schools like Amherst, Williams, and Wesleyan, Bowen and his co-author concluded that athletes enjoyed substantial and unmerited advantages in admissions, tended to relatively underperform academically, and actually had a negative effect on campus life. There conclusions were assailed, sometimes with some force, on the basis of limited data samples and reliance on anecdotal information.
In the present book, Bowen returns with a considerably expanded dataset and a number of new analyses. The effect is to overwhelmingly confirm the prior conclusions. While one could probably find defects in some of the individual analyses, Bowen and Levin have done so many evaluations reaching the same conclusions that it is inescapable to conclude that they are correct. For example, they analyze data from 3 groups of schools with differing admissions policies towards recruited athletes and find a strong correlation between the relative advantage enjoyed by recruited athletes and academic underperformance. This kind of dose-effect relationship is very strong data. In addition, the conclusions drawn from their dataset are consonant with qualitative impressions and with the conclusions of independent studies done at individual schools in their dataset. Bowen and Levin have successfully overcome the challenges of their critics. A corollary point is that their critics have never offered any substantial data to back the implied claim that athletics produce unique benefits.
Bowen and Levin conclude with a series of recommendations for reform which are quite sensible. It has to be mentioned that one of the goals of their reform program is actually to broaden participation in college athletics. These suggestions should be pursued.
Bowen and Levin have a nice discussion of how this unfortunate state of affairs developed. The problems with athletics at these schools mirror and to some extent are driven by parallel changes in larger society. As these colleges have come to overvalue athletics, so has youth sports become semi-professionalized. This has created a typical vicious circle; parents, knowing that good colleges highly value athletics, drive their children down the road of early specialization in a sport and year round competition. In turn, the strong interest of these types of students in sports at a relatively high level is a partial driver of the overemphasis of college athletics. Bowen and Levin suggest that restoring balance to college sports would help to break this cycle. This may be correct and is certainly worth trying.
It is worth mentioning in this context that attempting to reverse the overemphasis on college and youth sports has implications beyond education. Bowen and Levin are particularly concerned with the effects of athletics on education, which is entirely proper. But, it is very likely that the semi-professionalization of youth sports is a contributing factor to the general decline in fitness occuring in younger Americans. By the end of elementary school, competitive sports increasingly become the province of a relatively select group of talented children. Coupled with the declining emphasis on physical education in schools and other relevant phenomena, the result is a large pool of increasingly inactive children. The long term consequences are likely to be a significant increase in cardiovascular disease and other significant medical problems.
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6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Telling it like it is, February 19, 2004
The authors have collected an enormous amount of data and presented it lucidly and tellingly. That alone is worth the price of the book. However one feels about elite institutions using different admission standards for recruited athletes,the authors should be given credit for illuminating the facts.
Most of the criticism I have seen has been of the "Kill the Messenger" variety, from people who clearly have "an axe to grind." To those whose minds are not already made up, I suggest reading the book.
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9 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Intellectually Dishonest, December 11, 2003
By A Customer
When he was president of Princeton, William Bowen was responsible for the "problem" he now criticizes. As president of the Mellon Foundation, he is responsible for millions of dollars of grants to Ivy and similar universities, and thus wields enormous power with them as he picks and chooses recipients of the largess he controls. Coincidentally, the "co-author" of this volume is the daughter of one of those recipients--the president of Yale. Just look at the list of people who "helped" him with drafts of the book.
People are entitled to write biased books; the problem here is that Bowen pretends he is not biased, and he obviously is(although more subtly than in his prior effort, Game of Life).
The data (which may represent a federal privacy violation by the colleges that revealed them) are manipulated into statistics to suit the biases and are fundamentally flawed. Data contrary to the biases is avoided or explained away, sometimes in the most Machiavellian manner. For a good rebuttal check out [website]
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