Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Loughla 1823 days ago
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.

3 comments

>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.

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.
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.