Among the general student body at OU, about six percent of students are sociology or criminology majors. Among the juniors and seniors on OU’s football team, about 44 percent are.
About two percent of students are human relations majors. On OU’s baseball team, 21 percent are.
For a variety of reasons, student athletes are concentrated within a few majors at greater numbers than the rest of the student body.
The phenomenon, known as clustering, isn’t unique to OU. Nathan Tublitz, the chairman of the Coalition of Intercollegiate Athletics, said universities across America have student athletes grouped disproportionately in certain fields of study.
“To ensure that students remain academically eligible, and therefore eligible to play sports, student athletes seem to cluster in very specific types of majors — oftentimes majors that are less rigorous than many other majors on campus,” Tublitz said.
Tublitz says clustering is a problem because athletes gravitate toward majors that are less likely to prepare them for success after college.
But officials in OU’s Athletics Department say the clustering at OU, which is less pervasive than it is at some Big 12 schools, is not a cause for concern.
The phenomenon seems limited to certain teams, notably the football, baseball, softball and gymnastics teams.
The most popular majors for all OU athletes are business, health and exercise sciences, human relations, sociology and multidisciplinary studies, according to data supplied by the athletics department. Together, students in these programs account for more than half of student athletes who have declared a major.
Tublitz said many factors can push students into certain majors, including personal preference, academic preparation, time constraints and institutional pressure.
“The question should be raised whether those students are clustering because they don’t have time to do something else or whether they’re being encouraged to major in those areas,” he said.
According to students familiar with the OU Athletics Department, the answer is both.
Many student athletes have huge demands placed on their time, which is consumed by class, practice, competition, mandatory tutoring and university events.
“It’s really astonishing that they make it through school,” said Wyatt Schmitz, an OU alumnus and until recently a tutor and note-taker for the athletics department. “They have a really heavy load of practice, performance and representation.”
But many of them also appear to have been encouraged to choose “clustered” majors by the athletics department’s advisers who guide athletes through college.
Influential advising
Craig St. John, the chairman of OU’s sociology department, has made a habit of asking the seniors he teaches why they chose to major in sociology.
“I’ve had kids tell me, ‘Because my adviser in the athletics department told me this is what I should major in,’” St. John said.
Gerald Gurney, senior associate athletic director for academics, said he doesn’t see clustering as a major problem, at least at OU.
He points to the fact that sociology and criminology, the stereotypical “athlete majors,” are among the largest majors on campus, even among non-athletes.
Gurney said he would be concerned “if 70 or 80 percent” of a team’s players had the same major, but the concentration of, for example, sociology majors on the football team, doesn’t bother him.
Gurney also denied that athletics advisers steer athletes toward certain majors.
“Advisers are just that. They offer advice,” Gurney said. “They never tell a student what to major in.”
But Schmitz, who worked with athletes from several different sports during his tenure with the athletics department, said advisers have ways of encouraging certain courses of action without telling athletes exactly what to do.
“The advisers will ‘suggest’ certain classes with a wink. They’ll say, ‘This class has a lot of athletes,’” Schmitz said. “They definitely know the easy professors.”
Cortney Carter, a former football player who graduated in December 2009 with a degree in sociology, said his adviser helped him decide on a major but didn’t give him any direct instructions.
“She told me, ‘Pick something you feel comfortable with, something you can get a good job with,’” Carter said. “She told me there’s no such thing as an easy major. She suggested a few, read the descriptions out to me and said it was my choice from there.”
Another former athletics department tutor who requested anonymity said some athletes who once studied difficult subjects told her that athletics department advisers strongly recommended they change their majors to something easier.
The woman asked to remain anonymous because she said she feared reprisal from the athletics department, which prohibits tutors from speaking to the media.
“I heard stories,” she said. “People would say, ‘My major was this,’ and it was something substantial, and it was something they wanted to do, and then it’s, ‘I got my major changed for me.’ So you get a lot of sociology.’”
St. John, the sociology chairman, isn’t shy about admitting that the major he oversees is not one of the most difficult on campus.
“It’s not physics or chemistry,” he said when asked why so many athletes major in sociology. “I’m guessing there are probably zero football players who are majoring in physics.”
The former tutor said in her experience, football players dealt with the most intense management of their academic careers. Players of other sports are often given more freedom to major, or even cluster, in difficult subjects.
And some of them appear to be clustering for all the right reasons.
More than a quarter of the athletes on the men’s gymnastics team are majoring in health and exercise sciences, a science-heavy major that sends students on to careers in nursing, physical therapy and coaching, among other fields.
Russell Czeschin, one of the HES gymnasts, said the nature of the subject, and the fact that it leads to many different career paths, is what attracts so many athletes.
“Gymnasts like to know about our bodies and get our bodies in the best shape possible to maximize our performance level,” he said. “So it makes sense that a lot of people would be interested in that.
Czeschin, a senior who weekly spent 20 hours on gymnastics, 15 at work and 15 in the classroom, is set to graduate with a 3.8 GPA and an acceptance to OU’s accelerated nursing program, which accepts only 45 students per year. By August 2010, he’ll be a registered nurse.
Czeschin said some of the students in the athletics department aren’t as committed to academics as they should be, and decisions about how much to invest in school are ultimately personal ones.
“There are a lot of athletes that are in school because of athletics, and that’s their number one priority,” Czeschin said. “But for me, my education was my number one priority. Gymnastics came after that.”
Staying eligible
There are as many reasons for athletes to gravitate toward certain majors as there are for non-athletes, but experts, administrators and students alike agree that athletes, and the athletics department officials who oversee them, face some unique pressures.
Athletics department officials are tasked with ensuring academic eligibility for student athletes, something that became more difficult in 2003 when the NCAA enacted a slate of academic reforms designed to increase athlete graduation rates.
College athletes now have to complete more credit hours per year than they did under the previous rules. If athletes haven’t completed 40 percent of the hours needed for a degree by the end of their second year of school, they are considered academically ineligible.
If too many of a school’s athletes are ineligible, the institution can face penalties including the loss of athletics scholarships.
Gurney said when the reforms were first enacted, some officials were concerned that OU might face penalties while adapting to the change. But thus far, OU has not only avoided penalties but put in place regulations that are even more stringent than the NCAA’s.
However, the former tutors said the athletics department’s emphasis on eligibility sometimes comes at the price of education.
Schmitz resigned from his position as a tutor in April because he felt like he was spending more time ensuring compliance with NCAA regulations than he was teaching.
He said athletics department officials give tutors and athletes the impression that they are more concerned with complying with NCAA rules than facilitating genuine learning.
“Their concern is for [student athletes] to pass classes, not for them to learn,” Schmitz said. “If in the process they happen to learn, great, it’s education. But it’s really about eligibility.”
The concern with eligibility isn’t limited to athletics department officials; some athletes, particularly those in the “revenue sports” of football and men’s basketball, display it as well.
“They’re not here because of school, they’re here because of the sport,” St. John said of some of OU’s athletes who hope to play professional sports. “Going to school, for them, is staying eligible.”
For elite athletes, staying eligible means staying on the field, or the court, where they are more likely to be seen on TV, noticed by scouts and prepared for a professional career.
Most students are at OU because they want to have academic experiences that will prepare them for their lives after college. But many athletes are at OU because they want to have athletic experiences that will prepare them for their lives after college.
“OU’s tradition of athletic excellence has many of its prospects coming to OU with professional aspirations,” Gurney said. “First and foremost, they want to be a professional athlete.”
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cdub 3 years ago
Wow, surprise that athletes have BS majors... what's new?
JJanowiak 3 years ago
Having so many of our athletes has a side effect of dragging down the academic standards of the departments they cluster in. Aside from those few high-performing athletes, most do the minimum to get by, and at least in one of my majors, sociology, the standards are TERRIBLE and catered towards a student population that is at best lazy and at worst simply stupid.
kdbp1213 3 years ago
after reading an article like this, i wonder "why do people go to college in the first place? get a degree/education or participate in extra-curricular activities?" also, what is everybody's priority while in college? the degree/education or the extra-curricular activity?