Beer and Circus How Big-Time College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education Book

For all its faults, this book honestly changed the course of my life. I read it shortly before applying to college. I was, and remain, a serious college sports fan, and prior to reading Sperber's book I looked at teams that did well in football and figured, well, I'll go to one of those universities. Then I read Sperber's book.

Sperber argues that sports-and-party-based frat-boy culture is being capitalized on by colleges, who market their party atmosphere and great sports teams to draw in an ever larger pool of applicants. They then take the tuition money and spend it on their prestigious grad programs, not to mention millions for the advertising, er, athletic department, which draws in ever more applicants. Meanwhile, the universities don't spend any significant money on their undergrad programs. They hire great faculty but then treat their undergrads to 750-person lecture halls taught by assistants, not the hot-shot professors that are advertised. They have rampant grade inflation. They accept virtually everyone and let just about anyone through, degrading the quality and relevance of the undergraduate degree. Thousands of students might not learn much or get a good, comprehensive education, but they will have a drunken good time doing it, and the university still gets the tuition money.

This book has some problems. It makes sweeping sociological generalizations of college culture (any school with 30,000 or 50,000 students cannot be fairly divided into three or four categories of student, as Sperber attempts). It has an obsession with the movie Animal House. It sometimes strays from its general thesis into other complaints. It's easy to come away with the general impression that a degree from a large state school is worthless, as is the education. (I think a fairer statement would be that you CAN get a good education from a large state school, but it's very easy to get a degree WITHOUT having gotten one.)

But the important message is this: big-time universities are using big-time college sports to draw in collegiates to an entertainment-based college experience, skimping on their undergrad programs, and using the tuition money to further fund sports teams and their extensive graduate programs to enhance their name and prowess. It's an academic pyramid scheme. The moral: for graduate education, go to Division I State U. For undergrad, try a DIII liberal arts school. Largely because of this book, that's what I did, and I haven't been disappointed.