Why should a top high school baseball prospect take up a spot at a college instead of a spot on a local A league team?

Why should a Political Science major take a spot at a college instead of joining a political group discussion on reddit? It’s not like it’s a real science and I don’t see any merit in it, nor what it contributes to college.

I’d much rather have athletes on campus even though I am not one. At least it provides nice facilities for healthy recreation (a lot healthier than just drinking a lot).

Yeah I sure got to use the 75,000 seat football stadium a lot for pickup games when I was in school. It's not like you need 'athletes' on campus to build student rec facilities.

Not what you meant, but the answer is because they are a profit center for the college.

Because money.

Sorry. That's the reality that everyone fails to talk openly about when discussing athletics. It brings in a lot of money for the top schools like Stanford, Michigan, Texas, Alabama and so on. You find a way to replace that revenue, a lot of schools would be happy to get rid of it. But until then?

I mean the B1G has a tv split of almost 100 million a year "per". Once all the former PAC12 schools unite with the B1G, that amount will be even larger.

All that to say this, no one is throwing away 100 million a year. Maybe the elite schools you can get to stop athletic admissions? But that 2nd tier of state flagships that are taking all that in? I'm not sure they would go down without an epic fight.

Now of course, we can question whether or not you need a men's baseball team to bring that money in? You probably don't. But they will all probably fight tooth and nail to keep football and basketball.

But they're already filthy rich. Maybe I'm being too much of an idealist, but universities should be about education, not sport centers.

Too late now. Profits are more important. Maybe the people who benefit don't even understand where you're coming from because they're so greedy. Doesn't excuse them for it, though.

At some schools I'm quite sure that graduating athletes also end up making more money than their non-athletic counterparts, which - even ignoring the "big sports" aspect of it - makes them more likely to become future donors to the university.

Maybe they should open up a casino instead. That would bring in a lot more money without needing to the through hoops of using sports teams to finance higher education.

Too expensive.

For Villanova, a basketball team costs next to nothing. And requires very little admin. A casino costs millions. And requires literally orders of magnitude more admin.

Because they want to become a CEO and not a baseball player? Competing at athletics at the highest level is a good preparer for the executive world. Certainly having a high standardized test score doesn't make you a better CEO candidate.

I'd rather have an engineer or an economist than someone who can hit a ball really well.

Also we don't do this in the rest of the world, the athletic scholarships thing is almost uniquely American.

That's fine, but you're not the one running harvard admissions. And they figure top high school baseball players bring something to the table that engineers and economists don't.

The Ivy Leagues famously don't give athletic scholarships. It's always news when they have a team that doesn't suck in sports people care about. Someone getting into a school on merit that has a serious hobby isn't the point of this discussion.

They don’t give scholarships but that isn’t quite the full story. The below link discusses ways a good sports background can make entrance considerably easier and costs far lower.

https://www.quora.com/Can-a-sports-scholarship-get-you-into-...