Students ignore their debts as long as their athletic teams win?

This blog post on the tax we are effectively imposing on the younger generation attracted quite a few visits, according the site traffic data.  I commented there, rather sarcastically, that:

The youth are paying big time for all our irresponsible decisions. But, youth being youth, their focus might not be in the metaphorical screw but in the literal one, and it will be a while before they will realize how much we have messed them up!

I should have noted there that jingoistic athletic worship distracts students as much as, or even more than, sex does.  How else could one explain students not only failing to protest against data--like the in map below, which is about the highest paid public employees in each state--but that they actually support increasing expenditure on athletics even though that only adds to their financial obligations come graduation?

As noted in the source for that map, such an allocation of money means:

This is money that is overwhelmingly going to field football, baseball, lacrosse, and other sports teams. It's not going to create new sections of Biology 101 or English 251 or underwrite the discovery of the next Streptomycin or publish the next Economics and the Public Interest or anything that remotely comes close to education or research.

I simply cannot understand how the public and elected officials alike can continue to engage in such a moronic and wasteful use of scarce resources that is not doing anything productive to make future generations richer and wiser!

In fact, it is the other way around: there is an athletic arms race.  

The trend begins with the broadest comparison possible in Division I – the more-elite FBS programs vs. the smaller, less-wealthy FCS ones. While the cost of instruction rose 53.3 and 48.2 percent at FBS and FCS institutions, respectively, and tuition rose 54.6 and 47.0 percent, instructional salaries increased only 15.8 and 14.14 percent. Total athletic coach salaries, meanwhile, rose 67.1 and 59.4 percent, and football coaches’ salaries rose even faster: 80.8 and 61.9 percent.
Narrow that down to the most elite of the elite, and the difference becomes even more stark. In the Bowl Championship Series conferences, whose champions automatically qualify for a slot in one of the five BCS bowl games, instructional salaries rose 15.8 percent – which, as it happens, is 1.7 percent higher than the increase at FCS programs. But total athletic coach salaries rose 78.4 percent, and football coach salaries rose 96.6 percent.

These are the few occasions when I allow myself to say this: Fuck!!!

“Presidents should really start asking the question, what is the purpose for athletics on my campus"

Oh yeah?  Good luck with that!

Meanwhile, students continue to pay for tuition and fees and don't even bother showing up for classes and don't care to turn in assignments.  What the heck is going on?

It is all beginning to show up in the real world:  

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, in a new study, found that 30-year-olds with student loans were now less likely to have debts like home mortgages than 30-year-olds without student loans — even though most of those with student loans are better educated and can expect to earn more money over their lifetimes. The same pattern holds true for 25-year-olds and car loans. 

“It is a new thing, a big social experiment that we’ve accidentally decided to engage in,” said Kevin Carey, the director of the Education Policy Program at the New America Foundation, a research group based in Washington. “Let’s send a whole class of people out into their professional lives with a negative net worth. Not starting at zero, but starting at a minus that is often measured in the tens of thousands of dollars. Those minus signs have psychological impact, I suspect. They might have a dollars-and-cents impact in what you can afford, too.” 

The weak economy and tight credit standards remain the main culprits preventing young people just establishing themselves from making major purchases. But millions now face putting a substantial share of their take-home pay toward past debts rather than present needs. Student loan debt leaves them with less money for things like clothes and restaurant meals. And it is even more likely to suppress purchases of more expensive items that need to be bought with credit. A poor job market is compounding the problem

Who cares, right, as long as the athletic monster is well fed?  Let me use that word once more: Fuck!!!