Sperber says undergraduates are getting ripped off by wholesale academic fraud. Says they spend their weekends getting sloshed. Great stuff, required reading for parents with teenagers. It might if the schools got more than 25 percent of the pot. Most of it goes to the NCAA, so it can crank out new regulations and try gallantly to enforce the old ones.
Athletic directors get raises and hotel suites and lobster dinners on the road to the Final Four.
If Sperber's gloomy portrait of campus life is accurate, they're getting a second-rate education, slithering through easy courses, tutored in the tough ones, allowed to plagiarize term papers. Shulman and Bowen are officers of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Bowen was once president of Princeton University. They have written a thorough, scholarly book crammed with charts and graphs and statistics. They studied 32 institutions, ranging from Michigan and Penn State to Williams and Swarthmore.