Interdisciplinary Studies at Tech?

92, didcha actually read the last few posts!? No offense, but it's hard to believe based on your post.
 
I am 42 years old so i guess I probably have another 40 football seasons left (if i am lucky). Anyone who thinks that GT will win the BCS and be crowned the sole football national champion (before one of us dies) can kindly send me $20 by the end of January 2008 and I will return $1,000 (adjusted by annual inflation) to you the day after we win the National Championship.

This assumes, of course, that academic majors that are favorable to athletics (which is hereby defined as a major easier than management) are not introduced.

At 50:1 odds I wonder how many fans will respond Yes?
 
BuzzMD said:
Actually, NC, I brought this up when 33 said the same thing. This is a myth that has been fairly well "busted" by several good studies.

"The most forceful conclusion that can be drawn about the indirect effects of athletic success is that they are small at best when viewed from the perspective of any individual institution. Alumni donations and applications for admission sometimes rise in the wake of conspicuously successful seasons at a small number of institutions, but such increases are likely to be both small and transitory. More to the point, the empirical literature provides not a shred of evidence to suggest that an across-the-board cutback in spending on athletics would reduce either donations by alumni or applications by prospective students."

http://www.knightcommission.org/abou.../frank_report/
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Bull**** study. If you read it you will see two fallacies in it. First he's trying to justify or not starting a program...that's clearly not what we're talking about. We have a program and are considering what impact big success might have. Second, he admits the difficulty in gathering any empircal data so they make assumptions and use generalities. I was at Duke when admissions skyrocketed. I knew people in the annual giving office when they started raking in the dollars. There was absolutely no doubt why it all happened when it did. Also consider Appy State. On the heels of their 3rd National Championship in a row, they expect over 18,000 applicants for a freshman class that will number around 2200-2400. Those are all facts. Finally, funny things that the Knight Commission would author a study showing spending money on college athletics is a bad idea. Sorry, but I'm not buying.
 
NC,

Especially with regards to admissions, a winning sports program can increase attention, but it cannot seal the deal. I will not argue with you that Duke winning national championships multiple years made people in Nevada and out West know what Duke was and where, but if it was not an excellent school, the effect would not have been as good. It is called the Flutie effect, I think. When Flutie beat Miami, BC applications increased for one year, but then fell right back to normal--because BC did not have the attraction to keep the students interest up.

And the Knight Commission report was not a study, but a review of multiple studies. One of the other studies was looked at football at private institutions. Summary of the article: "Conclusions. While there is a modest positive effect at Division III colleges, our results do not support the notion that winning and giving go hand-in-hand at the selective private universities that play big-time football."

http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/0038-4941.00061?journalCode=ssqu
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flutie_effect
http://www.economist.com/debate/freeexchange/2007/01/flutie_effect.cfm
 
Those studies are not talking about the impact I described. Duke didn't win a big game (the Flutie effect) nor was it simply about any correlation between winning percentage and giving. What Duke did, and what a school needs to do to have a serious impact, is elevate itself significantly. Duke went from a pretty good program, to arguably the premier program in the country for the 90s. Appy State has won 3 national championships. It's about achieving and sustaining a high level. Simply moving your football record from 7-5 to 9-3 isn't what I'm talking about.

You are right that the school must do other things to sustain the increase in attention. BC for example was already a good school and once the national profile was raised it leveled off. Of course the easy argument is that so did their athletics. BC is not a powerhouse in any sport that I'm aware of.
 
GoldZ said:
92, didcha actually read the last few posts!? No offense, but it's hard to believe based on your post.
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Yes I did, you are advocating new choices, but not Turf Management or Recreational Studies. Where I disagree is that we don't need any new programs for the purpose of athletics.

I didn't go back too far because I was getting bored with this debate on whether the sports programs help the school overall. Looking at the Ivy League, MIT, Cal Poly, etc., it seemed like a worthless debate.
 
I am not against adding new programs at Tech, I am simply against adding pointless programs designed to attract athletes. And if you look at the number of flush letters Tech sends out every year, we're obviously not having any problem attracting prospective students, merely the blue chippers that some people seem to think we need in order to compete year in and year out.

As for money coming to the school from athletics, I don't recall the new computer building being called the 10-win computer science department, or library additions being called the football learning learning center. The fact is that our AA department has enough bills that they need to take care of right now. I've seen the speech from the Alumni Association, I've seen how much cash the school receives from corporate donors/state funds/athletic revenue/etc... If I thought that football was largely responsible for the projects on campus, I'd agree with adding easier majors. It's not, and we shouldn't. Nothing at Tech should ever come easy. Which is why Tech is the school it is.
 
Allen Koholic said:
As for money coming to the school from athletics, I don't recall the new computer building being called the 10-win computer science department, or library additions being called the football learning learning center. The fact is that our AA department has enough bills that they need to take care of right now. I've seen the speech from the Alumni Association, I've seen how much cash the school receives from corporate donors/state funds/athletic revenue/etc... If I thought that football was largely responsible for the projects on campus, I'd agree with adding easier majors. It's not, and we shouldn't. Nothing at Tech should ever come easy. Which is why Tech is the school it is.
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So you think it is just coincidence that we win the NC in women’s tennis AND get a huge grant for nanotechnology research in the same year?
 
As expected, you're totally missing my point....which is winning big, not just 10 games, has an impact. I'm not saying we will do it at Tech... just refuting the idea that it doesn't matter.
 
This is an interesting discussion, but I still feel like it ignores something I brought up earlier, and what is for me one of the biggest issues with our athletics program. We are *dead last* in the ACC in SA graduation.
As far as I am concerned, if you claim that academics are the most important thing at Tech, then knowing that only 55% (or so) of our athletes are graduating should really bother you (as it does me). The Univeristy has done a fantastic job improving rentention among the student body at large, and I think we need to do the same for the SAs. Maybe that means offering easier/more diverse selection of majors, but maybe there are other options to make sure we provide our athletes with the best opportunity to be successful.
 
When you talk about graduation rates I think you need to get deeper into it than just whether they graduated or not. My first question is why kids don't graduate. Meaning did they go pro or transfer or did they actually spend 4+ years here and not get a degree. If a SA is in good academic standing and doesn't graduate, I don't know why that's a measure of the school.
 
wreck2000 said:
This is an interesting discussion, but I still feel like it ignores something I brought up earlier, and what is for me one of the biggest issues with our athletics program. We are *dead last* in the ACC in SA graduation.
As far as I am concerned, if you claim that academics are the most important thing at Tech, then knowing that only 55% (or so) of our athletes are graduating should really bother you (as it does me). The Univeristy has done a fantastic job improving rentention among the student body at large, and I think we need to do the same for the SAs. Maybe that means offering easier/more diverse selection of majors, but maybe there are other options to make sure we provide our athletes with the best opportunity to be successful.
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When we adjust our average for people like Calvin, Crit, and Young who went on to pro careers, how does our graduation rate look? Just guessing, but I bet Tech is last in the ACC in non-athlete graduation rate as well.
 
We are *dead last* in the ACC in SA graduation.
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What place are we in the ACC in general student body graduation?

beej67,
doesn't know the answer, but has a pretty good guess..
 
Actually, the SA graduation rate bothers me alot. It's not as good looking as it should be, and it is disproportionate to the overall grad rates. I think that having someone like Paul Johnson might help with the discipline. Hopefully, no more Reggie Balls.

Adding easier majors or SA specific programs is certainly not the answer here though.
 
Well, do we know that Reggie won't graduate? Supposedly once they got to the bottom of things he should have been eligible for the Gator Bowl, or at least that's one claim. Regardless, the question stands, are they not graduating because they are no longer here, or are they using their eligibility with no degree?
 
WracerX said:
When we adjust our average for people like Calvin, Crit, and Young who went on to pro careers, how does our graduation rate look? Just guessing, but I bet Tech is last in the ACC in non-athlete graduation rate as well.
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Actually, Georgia Tech's student body grad rate is 77% according to the latest statistics. That is higher than FSU, NC State, Clemson, and for the record, UGA.
Of course the numbers get skewed due to transfers, going pro, etc, which means the 55% SA grad rate doesn't mean much in itself, but I think it is very useful as a comparison to other schools. Do you really think Tech has *more* people that go pro than FSU, Clemson, etc. Probably not. So if Clemson graduates 71% of their SA, and we graduate 55%, that means something is wrong (IMO)
 
ncjacket said:
When you talk about graduation rates I think you need to get deeper into it than just whether they graduated or not. My first question is why kids don't graduate. Meaning did they go pro or transfer or did they actually spend 4+ years here and not get a degree. If a SA is in good academic standing and doesn't graduate, I don't know why that's a measure of the school.
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If someone has spent 6 years at Tech (graduation statistics are based on 6 years) and does not have a degree, they have probably been taking too many electives, and not focusing enough on core classes. The reason it is a problem is that you can't get a job with "good academic standing". You have to have a degree, and I think we are letting too many SAs leave Tech (probably because their elegibility is up) without making sure they have that degree.
 
That was my point though. If we're keeping kids until they've used their eligibility and they don't graduate I have a problem with how we're running the program. But if our rates are lower because we have kids transferring, that's a different story. If they are in good standing when they leave, it's not our fault they left. I really don't think that many guys who use their 4 years don't graduate. Someone will have to show me the numbers.
 
The problem is that some of our SA's have no shot to graduate. Feel certain that most of the 5 and 4 star recruits have no chance to graduate from Tech.
 
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