People can take Vivek’s points in a variety of ways. I have my own take. He is talking about the issue. Let me explain as an example of how I view it.
Aberdeen, South Dakota had two colleges. One was a Catholic college for nurses. It is no longer open. Not because there isn’t a demand for nurses. It got into financial problems at least in part to the fact they built a multi-million dollar arena for basketball. This would have been an NAIA division school. Across town, Northern State University is now a NCAA division 2 school. The quarterback gets paid $30,000. They maybe draw between 300 and 500 fans for their games.
My nephew is on a basketball team at a small school in North Dakota. There are two kids on that team that grew up within 600 miles (probably 1000 miles) of that school. They probably average 100 fans per game. Somebody flew to Texas, Florida, etc to recruit these players.
My nephew is an A student in biology. He was recruited for basketball, but not for his academic aptitude.
I have a great nephew that is in his freshman year for engineering. He had a 3.5 grade point average and a pretty high ACT. I can’t remember, but I think it was 28. My sister asked me to help him with scholarship applications. He didn’t need my help because he was all over it. However, no college recruited him. No school official even talked to him about going to a STEM program.
I believe there are 500,000 NCAA athletes and about half get financial assistance.
Ohio State made $279 million dollars from it’s athletic programs.
Something is wrong and when someone like Vivek suggests something is wrong he is ridiculed.
Here is what I would suggest. I would say we want to eliminate the need for H1B visas in 10 years. In order to do this we need to double the amount of graduates in the fields that are in demand. This is a NASA go to the moon critical mission.
What we are going to do is the following. We will generate two billion dollars per year from H1B fees that corporations will pay. This money will be added to a pool that funds the new critical mission. We will require every University that funds athletic scholarships to fund an equivalent critical need academic scholarship whether at that University or at another University within the same State. Div 1 schools alone fund 3.6 billion in athletic scholarships. Whatever these schools spend on their on their athletic department an equal amount will be provided to the critical need program. This will be used to fund the academic departments to accomplish the same thing it funds for athletics. Recruitment, facilities, personnel, etc.
In 2021, the federal government funded $174.9 billion in postsecondary education programs, with approximately 65% going to student aid, 27% to grants, and 8% to contracts. This suggests that for grants specifically, around $47.223 billion (27% of $174.9 billion) was allocated.
This will be prioritized to fund critical need programs. It can start with need based and any excess will be provided regardless of need until all critical needs programs are fully funded.
Each University will prioritize the critical need programs for their normal scholarship funding. Any scholarships that are not specifically directed by the scholarship funder will be used for students of critical needs programs.
Now that we have plenty of funding. We will use this funding not just to provide full scholarships, but to incentivize Universities to grow their program by giving those that grow their critical needs program excess funding and we will use certification to prevent grade inflation.
Each University that has a program for the critical needed degrees will need to grow graduations by 7% per year which will double the amount of graduates in 10 years. If it is growing it gets money. If it isn’t, it doesn’t.
This is just off the top of the head, but there is plenty of funding available if properly directed.
Edit: .
We will know we are making progress when we see academic recruitment like athletic recruitment. The high school football coach, the parents, the athlete and the recruiter discussing all the great advantages of their particular school and offering to fly the athlete out to take a look around. Hopefully, we will see the science teacher, the student, the parents and the academic recruiter discussing the benefits of Ohio States math department and offering to fly the student out to take a look around. Yea they flew me out and put me up at this fantastic hotel. The engineering students took me out for some fun and gave me all this swag. It was great, but I want to go take a look at Purdue before deciding.
