What will college football look like in 5 years?

[Mike80]

I don't think things will change appreciably for at least 20 years.

Too much money and bureaucratic inertia to change quickly.

 

[cincibuck]

I don't think things will change appreciably for at least 20 years.

Too much money and bureaucratic inertia to change quickly.

I don't know. The changes are coming awfully quick on the academic side of the house - increasing pressure on HS to create AP courses, more pressure on schools to allow HS students to take core curriculum classes in lieu of HS senior English and math. All of this with the idea to get students through college quicker. From my perspective, the college core curriculum itself has been reduced in favor of tech Vo Ed.

So what's this got to do with college football? How do you feel about the tuition your kid pays if you know that some of your tax dollars are being spent to provide a football program at Kent, Ohio U., Miami, Cincinnati, and Bowling Green?

Right now, Ohio State gets away with it because they make enough money to keep it all self-contained. I'm suggesting that as the cost of college increases, parents are going to be dipping deeper into their home equity, retirement savings, and other discretionary funds to give their kid the benefit. They are going to become increasingly more interested in examining where their tax dollars go - bread and circuses will be one of the items to be chucked.

 

[DaddyBigBucks]

I don't know. The changes are coming awfully quick on the academic side of the house - increasing pressure on HS to create AP courses, more pressure on schools to allow HS students to take core curriculum classes in lieu of HS senior English and math. All of this with the idea to get students through college quicker. The college core curriculum itself has been reduced in favor of tech Vo Ed. From my perspective.

So what's this got to do with college football? How do you feel about the tuition your kid pays if you know that some of your tax dollars are being spent to provide a football program at Kent, Ohio U., Miami, Cincinnati, and Bowling Green?

Right now, Ohio State gets away with it because they make enough money to keep it all self-contained. I'm suggesting that as the cost of college increases, parents are going to be dipping deeper into their home equity, retirement savings, and other discretionary funds to give their kid the benefit. They are going to become increasingly more interested in examining where their tax dollars go - bread and circuses will be one of the items to be chucked.

While your last sentence is probably true (that they'll chuck football before looking at other issues), the cost of football is a tiny spit into the incomprehensible ocean of tuition inflation. The price of higher education keeps going up, and they are going to price themselves right out of existence. There is already a lot of talk in America about reexamining our credentialing system from the ground up. People are learning how to code, for example, from private firms that are not even affiliated with universities, and some are translating that into 6 figure jobs right out of high school.

We already live in a world where no one asks to see your diploma except for your very first job out of college (true for me any every engineer I know anyway). And many of the best engineers I've known were guys who had zero formal education after high school. We already live in a world where my 2 most important credentials come from entirely outside of academia, and the same is true for my brother the OT. Some day soon the world will wake up and realize that academia has it's place, but that place no longer has (will have) anything to do with credentialing the vast majority of occupations... including most of what we call professions.

What college football looks like in that world remains to be seen. What's certain is that its administration will be very different than what currently exists.