[fiftyfifty]

The solution in my opinion is to do away with college athletic scholarships and preferred admission for athletes. Let school's field their sports teams from their normal student bodies and ensure that those teams are truly amateur and the participants really are "student-athletes". Let the NBA and the NFL field their own semi-professional minor leagues like baseball does. If these schools have to start paying their football and basketball players (and lets be perfectly clear, that's what this is about), it will be the absolute death of virtually every other men's sport at the college level, and will likely only leave enough women's sports to offset the football team due to Title IX. I won't even get into the ridiculous hypocrisy of our institutions of higher learning pouring billions of dollars into a sport that is proven to cause brain damage, while cutting other sports that don't. That is not at all what college athletics should be about, it should be about extracurricular opportunities for real students. I think the Division 3 model (no sports scholarships/no backdoor admissions) has been much more successful and has provided many more opportunities for students (men and women) to compete in a wider variety of sports. I say this as someone who was a college athlete on scholarship years ago and still coaches high school.

[hervature]

Why do you assume that paying the athletes will have any meaningful impact on expenses? I will be using my numbers from [1]. Coming in at 65 on expenditure, University of Kansas spends $14 million on football. At the time of the article, they hadn't been to a bowl game in a decade and the drought has since continued. I'm sorry Jayhawks, but the program isn't good at all. First, no school is going to remove scholarships because that's an easy way for the university to pay their athletes. Paying the football players $10k per year would only cost an additional $1.05M for a 105 man roster. That's less than 10%. That is easily covered by increasing price of tickets by $2 in their 50,000 capacity stadium over the course of the season. But students watch for free? Well, not really, they already paid in their student fees. So fees have a one time increase of $2. But more realistically, these are football players that will never go to the NFL. They are happy for a free education and the Jayhawks would never pay them in additional to what they give them already. These rules apply solely to the top 10 teams that wish they could pay the top recruit of the nation $100k. I say that all of this is easily fixed by giving the players 10% of their jersey sales. It is completely insane that the NCAA can make money off of a person's likeness and not pay them which is illegal in most states.

[1] - https://www.syracuse.com/orangefootball/2017/08/which_school...

[fiftyfifty]

We saw during Covid that as soon as there was a tiny bit of financial stress on athletic departments they immediately started cutting non-revenue sports, here's a fairly complete list from the last year:

https://businessofcollegesports.com/tracker-college-sports-p...

You can see from that list that the vast majority of sports that were cut were non-revenue, men's sports. $1.05M lost to paying the football team could just as likely be covered by cutting one or two non-revenue sports as it is by raising ticket prices. The reality is attendance of college football games was already down before Covid, even for powerhouse schools like the University of Georgia:

https://ugawire.usatoday.com/2019/03/27/college-football-gam...

It is extremely unlikely that even the biggest football schools will be able to cover the cost of paying their players through increase ticket prices when they are already concerned about filling seats.

[hervature]

I wouldn't constitute COVID "a tiny bit of financial stress". That list is clearly temporary cuts. Stanford "cut" all sports programs and now they are all back. Your second article states that fans just prefer to watch on TV. Thus, the schools will make it back in more lucrative TV contracts.

But your entire argument lacks the essential point that salaries will be market driven. That, already, most programs cannot pay for their athletes. That scholarships and world class facilities and coaching are more than sufficient compensation. Scholarships again being pennies on the dollar for the university. We're talking on the order of a dozen schools that are willing to pay and 100 players that will realistically get any type of meaningful compensation.

[chrisseaton]

> it will be the absolute death of virtually every other men's sport at the college level

Why's that?

[chadash]

In the current system, schools need to have an equivalent number of sports teams (and slots) for men and women, with the same number of scholarships (the law governing this is called Title IX). Generally speaking, women's sports don't bring in money for schools, whereas football at a competitive school will bring in money in the form of TV deals and even donations from alumni. So essentially, the football and basketball teams subsidize the rest of the athletic department. If you had to pay the athletes in these sports, then there'd be less money to go around for other teams that don't generate revenue. But at a minimum, you'd still need a few women's teams because of Title IX.

EDIT: to clarify, I personally think it's ridiculous that star college athletes don't get paid given how much time those athletes put in and how much money they bring in for schools, but I also think that at least at the schools with huge athletic programs it'll have some effect on other sports.

[slg]

>If you had to pay the athletes in these sports, then there'd be less money to go around for other teams that don't generate revenue.

This relies on the assumption that sports are somehow separate from a school's educational mission and therefore must be funded by the profit from other sports. There are a maximum of only 2 or 3 dozen athletic departments that are self sufficient in the manner you suggest. The rest fund sports the same way they fund any other extracurricular activity.

I'm not sure we should require sports to fund themselves when we don't have that requirement on something like a drama or music departments. The understudy in a school play is probably no more likely to make a career out of acting than the backup QB is to make a career out of football, so why do we pretend one is a worthwhile academic pursuit and one isn't?

[Loughla]

Your math doesn't work out here. I can't major in football, I absolutely can major in drama and/or music. From my experience, club sports and clubs such as the theater club are funded via student fees, whereas departmental projects such as drama and music are funded via tuition.

In theory, the major areas are self-funding because of the tuition costs.

[slg]

>Your math doesn't work out here. I can't major in football

Literally, no you can't major in football. From a practical standpoint many of the athletes who go to a school like Alabama to play football do end up majoring in it. Maybe their actual degree will say something sports specific like kinesiology or sports management, maybe their academic advisers will point them to general education classes specifically targeted for athletes and they will end up with a super generic business or communications degree, but either way football is the primary focus for many of them.

>From my experience, club sports and clubs such as the theater club are funded via student fees, whereas departmental projects such as drama and music are funded via tuition.

The point is who funds a play or a concert at universities? Do they all need to be financially self-sufficient or do we accept that these pursuits have value outside of the number of people who will pay to watch them?

>In theory, the major areas are self-funding because of the tuition costs.

This isn't true. The costs to teach different subjects varies wildly and departmental budgets are therefore not always inline with the number of students in each specific program. For example, tuition from an English department would likely go to help subsidize a more expensive Physics department.

[danvasquez29]

you kinda can in a lot of universities with big programs. There's a lot of "sports marketing" and "sports science" majors now that get a little loose with requirements and rigor. when done right, they can be good tools to prep athletes for life after playing (agents, marketing, phys ed instructors and coaches, etc.) but they also run the risk of being places for the football team to sleep through class and get an A for working out and attending video.

[nradov]

Maybe students should be able to major in football? There are music and theater arts performance majors. Is football less important?

There are already football adjacent majors already like sports administration and sports broadcasting.

[chadash]

> There are a maximum of only 2 or 3 dozen athletic departments that are self sufficient in the manner you suggest

By the same token, there's only a few dozen athletic programs with athletes who would probably be paid if not for NCAA rules banning pay.

[slg]

No, that is a poor conclusion. Athletes are not distributed in the nature you are suggesting. There are profitable players who exist on unprofitable teams and there are profitable teams that exist in unprofitable athletic departments. The reverse is also true.

Honestly the biggest stumbling block for me to be in support of paying college athletes are all these details on deciding who gets paid and how much since they don't all provide uniform value. There are situations in which one person might be worth millions and their teammate might be worth absolutely nothing. That is one of the reasons why I think allowing players to profit of their name, image and likeness (NIL) rights seems like the first step. That allows the free market to better assess their value and reward them for it. Roughly half the states have already passed, are currently debating, or have recently debated laws allowing college players to profit of their NIL rights.

[chadash]

> No, that is a poor conclusion. Athletes are not distributed in the nature you are suggesting. There are profitable players who exist on unprofitable teams and there are profitable teams that exist in unprofitable athletic departments. The reverse is also true.

Fair, but a few schools would be disproportionately affected by paid athletes. Ohio State and Alabama would probably pony up a lot, just as they spend tons on their athletic departments right now. Northwestern probably wouldn't, except maybe in rare cases.

> That is one of the reasons why I think allowing players to profit of their name, image and likeness (NIL) rights seems like the first step.

Agree this sounds like a good first step. It's utterly ridiculous that they can't.

> That allows the free market to better assess their value and reward them for it.

Why is this better than schools bidding on player contracts? Would you argue that when Patrick Mahomes got a $150 million contract, that wasn't the free market making an assessment of his value?

[triceratops]

Alternatively, universities would spin off their money-making teams into professional organizations in return for licensing fees.

[handrous]

The 2-3 huge money-maker sports tend to fund all the rest. Paying athletes real money will cut into those profits (especially if a strong labor market for student athletes develops) with a plausible result being that other sports will be cut as budgets tighten. The only ones that would be for sure safe would be whatever women's sports are needed to achieve Title IX parity with the income-generating men's sports.

Of course, it's also possible that colleges will find other ways to pay for the "lesser" sports, and there would be no cuts.

[chrisseaton]

> tend to fund all the rest

How much 'funding' does an amateur university sport need? I don't think my fencing club at university had any 'funding' we just met and fenced. Occasionally we borrowed a van to go to a competition. We had a coach we paid from a few pounds of membership fees we collected from ourselves.

[csa]

In the US, in no particular order:

- equipment

- coaches

- travel/hotel/per diems, sometimes long distance depending on league

- trainers

- workout facilities (typically shared)

- practice facilities (might be shared)

- game facilities

- additional dining options to accommodate training

- nutritionists

- doctors

- scholarship money for tuition

- scholarship money for room and board

- video review areas and equipment (shared)

- video recording equipment and videographers

- insurance

- announcers for events

- recruiting

- tutoring

- event management

- publicity/advertising

- title ix compliance official

Note that at some universities (even some high schools), there are self-funding booster clubs that will pay for a lot of this stuff for some sports. That said, there is still some stuff that the university has to pay for directly.

As a simple example, Alabama football (big program that makes tons of money) also funds Alabama’s championship teams in golf, softball, and gymnastics (and many other sports that have not led to national championships).

[jessaustin]

If money is unlimited, you could come up with reasons to fund all of the junk you've listed. For GP's example of a college fencing team, they need 1) occasional use of a well-ventilated room with a hard floor [and one or two electrical outlets if they're using that fancy electronic scoring] and 2) storage for their equipment when they're not using the room. Literally nothing else is needed. Few fans would ever pay to see fencing, so these actual student-athletes don't need any more compensation than the room and the storage. Equipment can be funded by donations and dues. Coaches should mostly be volunteers, but if someone needs payment that can also be from dues or donated.

(Source: I played on my college club kendo team. If anything the needs of fencing are less than those of kendo.)

[csa]

At most schools, what you are describing are called “club sports”. These sports have much less funding from the university, and they are ubiquitous.

The next logical question is probably “why aren’t all sports club sports?” The short answer is that varsity football and basketball are often direct or indirect money makers for the school that warrant funding for competitiveness, and title ix that says that there has to be access to sports at equal levels (typically this means a university needs a few women’s sports that have equivalent quality equipment, facilities, etc. as football and basketball).

[chrisseaton]

I just don’t get why a university amateur golf team needs anything but a few people and their golf gear. Why take it so seriously?

[csa]

It’s a business decision and it’s law.

1. If a certain sports outcome (e.g., beating a rival, league championship, etc.) will lead to an increase in alumni donations, then it might be considered prudent to invest some money into that program.

2. Title ix creates weird incentive structures for athletic programs, with a default assumption being that the university is guilty of discrimination if there isn’t a lot of equal treatment for all sports (both men and women). Note that this has helped funding for women’s sports a lot (the disparity was almost comical in the 80s and prior), but it has also led to the elimination of some fringe men’s varsity sports (some of which became clubs).

[yupper32]

Because everyone else you're competing against is taking it seriously.

Please try to step back and understand why people take it seriously and truly care about sports. You don't seem to understand and don't seem to be actually trying to understand. It's exhausting trying to have conversations like the OP topic when people come in and degrade high level sports at its core.

[chrisBob]

That is an easy argument for an outsider to make in virtually any situation. The answer is probably similar to the reason you aren't doing your programming job on an 11" chrome book.

[labcomputer]

From a US perspective:

Most "rec sports" are self-funded university-affiliated student clubs. I was the treasurer of one such club for three years.

My school's cycling team ran about a $20k-$25k/year budget to cover race transportation, motels, entry fees, coaching and an annual 2-night training camp. That was for a full collegiate road season with an average of 6-8 riders and about 75% of a MTB season with 2-3 riders.

Funding came from sponsors (mostly selling space on the team jersey), selling jerseys and bibs to alumni and donations. Most of the sponsors were alums with local businesses, but we also had a couple bigger brands (energy bars and cycling clothing) who gave "in-kind" donations of steep discounts on merch (>50%).

Team members paid for their own equipment. We did discuss buying a couple team bikes to bring in people who could not afford them, but budget constraints and concerns about damage/jealousy/competitiveness nixed the idea.

I'd guess that you could run a competitive "varsity" cycling team, including everything I mentioned above plus mechanics and equipment but excluding scholarships, for around $40k-$50k/year (assuming mechanics are paid a day rate at races and piecewise for maintenance and the coaching staff is not full-time university employees).

[camgunz]

I think OP is referring to the spectacle that is collegiate football/basketball/baseball; not that there won't be these teams, they just won't be multi-billion dollar enterprises.

[jessaustin]

Since the ostensible point of colleges and universities is education in various academic subjects, the absence of high-dollar athletic teams wouldn't be an actual problem.

[fiftyfifty]

Yes! This is exactly what I was alluding too in my original comment. I will also add that there are a number of demographic factors that are going to come to a head over the next 10 years or so that are going to put a serious squeeze on non-revenue men's sports:

First college enrollment is likely going to drop significantly starting around 2025 due to severely declining birthrates in the US that started during the 2007-2008 financial crisis. It is expected that 2025 will be the smallest graduating high school class in the US in the last 30-40 years. Every college and university is going to be fighting over a smaller pool of applicants. Fewer people are going to attend games and fewer people will be watching college sports on TV which means smaller TV contracts.

The percentage of men attending college has been declining, in 2017 57% of college students in the US were women: https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=98

And it looks like the declining rate of men in higher education is only speeding up: https://hechingerreport.org/the-pandemic-is-speeding-up-the-...

College men and male alumni disproportionately support college athletics, they attend games and donate to the athletic department more than their female counterparts. Fewer men on campus in the long term likely means less money for the athletic department as a whole: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/nvsm.34

Lastly, Title IX only requires that sports opportunities for both men and women be proportional to the percentage of men and women in the student body. With only 43% of college students nationwide being men now, and football being the juggernaut of college athletics that it is (with typically over 100 players on a college football team), there will be little room left for any other men's sports in college athletics, and no incentive for the athletic department to keep them around.

Over the next decades many men's sports will likely become nearly extinct at the D1 level: tennis, golf, rowing, wrestling, hockey, volleyball, swimming and diving, cross country, even track and field and baseball look to be in big trouble as athletic departments try to keep the revenue from college football flowing in while dealing with these challenging demographic factors.

[yupper32]

This would end up killing a bunch of smaller sports, and hurting the larger ones.

NCAA covers a massive number of sports. The vast majority of those who go pro in any US sport, first go through an NCAA team.

Think about a scenario in the current world: You're a pretty good golf player in high school. You commit to Stanford for golf and a degree in some STEM field. The school already has a system in place to make sure both are possible. You give high level competitive college golf a shot and realize you can actually go pro. After college, you do. And even if it doesn't work out, you've got a degree from Stanford.

And then there's your world: You're a pretty good golf player in high school. You go to college instead of the separate LPGA feeder leagues because it's the safer bet and your school doesn't have a system in place to make sure you can compete in both. Why would they? You never get to experience and thrive in the high level competitions and end up not going pro.

So many professional sports would get maimed with your model. After a decade the US would heavily drop on the world stage when it comes to sports.

[triceratops]

Sounds like that's a problem for the pro sports leagues to solve. They have the money to do it, so they'll be fine.

Baseball does an adequate job with its system of minor league teams. Pretty much every other country in the world manages to have professional sports leagues without having universities be their feeder teams.

Even in your scenario, there's nothing stopping the aspiring golfer from attending Stanford part-time while they try to make it in pro-golf. Or applying and deferring admission for a couple of years. Frankly, they'd do better academically if they didn't have golf distracting them.

[danvasquez29]

baseball arguably does a terrible job at solving this.

the minor league system pays significantly less than poverty wages. incentivizing kids to go that route instead of getting an education is terrible.

which is why so many dont, and go to college on scholarships anyway, which leads us right back where we started.

the right analogy to make IMO is ice hockey, especially the canadian model. There, you have well funded and professional-like "minor leagues" (called juniors close to same thing). you can't get paid but in the tier 1 leagues you have very little if not zero personal living expenses, it's like being on a full-ride at a big college program with room and board included. In canada, it's seen as the route potential NHLers take instead of continuing with school. you're not allowed to be paid, but there's a rule in place that for every year you play in that league you're owed one full year of college paid for. If you age out of the league and dont make it as a pro, you at least get 2-4 years of free college to go get the rest of your life together as compensation.

The US Junior system has some of those attributes but is more geared towards getting kids into NCAA scholarships. The thing there though, IMO, is that the money involve in that sport is right about at that sweet spot where i'd argue a full ride to school like notre dame or penn state is about right for the level of compensation owed.

all opinions above are my own, in the context of a former D1 ice hockey athlete who thinks the football players should probably be paid.

[twiddling]

The Canadian Major Juniors are a great model. Of course, there also players who try out at MJ camps with their names obscured as not to jeopardize their NCAA eligibility.

Baseball's history of labor abuse ( read up on the history of free agency ) is why the Minors are a terrible mechanism.

[Ekaros]

In capitalist system, if the sport league doesn't make money should the workers be paid anything more than minimum wage?

[danvasquez29]

minimum wage is minimum wage (IMO?), the business losing money only dictates how long that position will exist for, not change the compensation owed for performing employed work.

in minor league baseball, who's indepent teams may be anywhere on the spectrum of losing or making money but who are also affiliated with parent organizations that make hundreds of millions, there is a plethora of literature lately that accuses them of paying significantly less than US minimum wage. In many cases it appears the players pay them for the right to play when it's all done.

in the college hockey example i referred to, the D1 teams/leagues usually have decent revenue from tickets and tv deals but it's not a ton and i'd take a shot in the dark that most programs are pretty much breaking even after scholarships, staff, and facilities are accounted for. In that environment, having an athlete get "paid" maybe a $40k/year total package in scholarship, room and board, playing equipment and facilities use, and cash per diems on road trips is both above minimum wage and probably no more than they could reasonably expect if the league was "pro" and had nothing to do with college.

[tzs]

> Even in your scenario, there's nothing stopping the aspiring golfer from attending Stanford part-time while they try to make it in pro-golf.

Does Stanford allow part time undergraduates? A brief Googling suggests that generally they do not, unless there are special circumstances, but it wasn't clear what would count as special circumstances.

[yupper32]

NBA? Sure. NFL? Yeah. They can probably fund and figure out the logistics for an operation like this.

What about all the other sports? At the moment, we've figured out a way to elevate less lucrative sports like track & field or swimming into a potential profession without making young people take massive risks by skipping higher education.

[jldugger]

NBA? Sure. NFL? Yeah. They can probably fund and figure out the logistics for an operation like this. What about all the other sports?

I'm really struggling to come up with a reason this is the academy's problem to solve.

[yupper32]

Its society's problem to solve. We shouldn't do away with college sports without a replacement avenue for people to get into high level sports.

Most people who want to do away with college sports seem okay with killing their professional leagues. We shouldn't be okay with that.

[triceratops]

> Most people who want to do away with college sports seem okay with killing their professional leagues.

Not at all. I just believe professional leagues will be fine with or without near-professional-quality college teams. There's far too much money in professional sports for them to die out just because universities don't field teams. I refer you to European soccer leagues for an alternative model.

Moreover de-facto professional athletes playing for a pittance and getting a poor education on top of that makes my blood boil. Pay them proper wages and don't screw up their education. College football and basketball teams also have a tendency to suck up resources and attention away from the actual purpose of a university - which is to perform research and educate people.

[jldugger]

I'm not sure I understand why we need to be so concerned as a country about the longevity of competitive rowing.

[cortesoft]

Why is skipping higher education to try to play professionally a massive risk? If it doesn’t work out, you can go to college after. Lots of people get jobs right after high school, then go back to school later. Not only that, but those people are usually going to jobs with a lot less upside than being a professional athlete.

[triceratops]

How do countries that are "not the US" produce swimmers or track and field athletes?

[twiddling]

often through direct state sponsorship

[triceratops]

I think Olympic athletes get government funding in the US as well.

There's also the possibility of firms like IMG funding athletes' expenses and training, in return for a cut of future earnings.

[eastWestMath]

Just because someone doesn’t go to college at 18 doesn’t mean they’re “skipping” higher education. Spending a few years making 30k a year to play basketball would be awesome - my father had teammates in college who put off grad/med school to go play in a shitty European leagues or random minor leagues around North America, it never sounded like they regretted it.

If they followed Hockey’s example, where playing a year in the MJ gives you a year of tuition, it could work out great for young players.

[Ekaros]

If they can't make money to pay athletes, maybe they do not deserve to survive. We don't subsidise aspiring people in most other fields, why should sports be any different.

[yupper32]

> We don't subsidise aspiring people in most other fields

Yes we do. It's called merit based scholarships.

[jackschultz]

This comment is getting downvotes and given my experience playing D1 college, getting a STEM degree, this scenario is in no way possible.

Stanford on its own is one of the top golf programs in the country. Its practice facility is absurdly good (my team was able to use it once when we were out there. The reason we were in the bay area? Because we took our spring breaks to go play fancy courses with rich alumni to get them to donate to the athletic department, which is another part of money you don't see but athletics gets.) You need to be really, really good to play at Stanford.

Second, college golf is a case where, because of the niceties like practice facilities, tournaments, where you don't pay for any of that, it's a feeder to the main tour. In fact, PGA Tour University[0] came out to help get guys who were good in college to the Tour quicker. The quality of guys in lower level tours is crazy, and this is a deserved bumper for the good guys. Guys play in college first because that's where you grow.

I'm very anti-NCAA. Each sport is different in terms of growing to the professional level though, and how engrained the NCAA is in most cases though makes it tough to have an overall solution.

[0] https://www.pgatour.com/university/what-you-need-to-know-faq...

[yupper32]

You're getting bogged down in the details of my example. I know a good amount of people who played D1 sports. One went pro and is competing in the Olympics this year. The others used their degrees to get "normal" jobs when they weren't able to go pro (or had no intention to in the first place). All of them would not have had the opportunity to compete at a high level in their sports without forgoing their higher education.

[cortesoft]

I was friends with quite a few D1 athletes when I was at college. Their sports took up so much of their time that they were only able to put minimum effort into academics. In fact, the coaches and staff would help guid them into known easy classes, so they would be able to maintain their grades while working 40+ hours a week in their sport.

It would make so much more sense for them to just hold off on school, go try to make it as a professional athlete, and then go back to school if it didn’t work.

No other country ties sports and athletics like the US does. Good soccer players in other countries sign contract at 10 years old, and play for the academy while getting paid.

[ecshafer]

So maybe we don't need so many professional sports players.

[yupper32]

Who needs those sports balls on the television, right?

[drewg123]

Given that college sports mostly loose money for schools[1], why do we think its OK to ask students and (for public colleges) taxpayers to subsidize professional sports' feeder system?

I went to a large state school (SUNY Buffalo) where the administration wanted to go division 1 when I was there in the early 90s. Transitioning to division 1 came along with a large (to us) mandatory athletic fee. The student body voted against this multiple times, and then the administration simply stopped asking and went division 1 anyway (and imposed the fee).

[1]:https://www.bestcolleges.com/blog/do-college-sports-make-mon...

[yupper32]

So in-state tuition at UB would be around $4850 instead of $5200 without sports. Out-of-state would be around $13,750 vs $14,100.

Would life be significantly better without sports at UB, if students were given back a few hundred dollars? Would alumni donations go down without the occasional March Madness appearance? Or Bulls games?

When people make this argument, they make it seem like schools would all of a sudden be able to afford a massively better educational experience. That's just not the case.

[drewg123]

Speaking from experience, the administration's disregard for the wishes of the student body pissed me off enough that I didn't donate anything to them for 15 years or so after graduation (until William Greiner, the president who presided over this had retired). Others in my peer group felt the same way, and I imagine did the same thing.

In terms of the impact of the fee: When I went to school, the tuition was $675/semester, and the fee was over $100 (I don't recall if that was per semester or per year). So that was at least a 7% increase in cost. Its sad the tuition has gone up so much.

[ecshafer]

It sounds like life would be significantly better without sports. 5200 vs 4850 is $350. That is the difference of a month of rent in Buffalo for your room, snow tires on your car that year or not, text books or not.

[Ekaros]

So around 24 hours of 15$/h minimum wage labour so that someone else can do something they could be doing on their own dime... That sounds very excessive burden to be placed on students. For something they gain very little from...