Happy #BlackHistoryMonth !
Q: Why are there not more Black computer science grads? Or... any STEM grads for that matter?
A: Lots of systemic racism reasons, but one of the biggest ones is college sports. Changing the college sports model will increase Black college graduates by *millions* of people over 10 years. Seriously. It's one of the biggest levers for grad rates.
Let me explain why, and why I was part of the group that sponsored the California Name, Image, and Likeness bill.
1/N
The first thing to understand is that in the USA, 60% of all Black men in college will drop out.😢
The primary reason for dropping out is not grades. It is financial hardship. This is true for students of all races. Not all poor students are Black, but in the US, most Black college students are poor.
You can ask a US college student 2 questions:
1) Are you rich?
2) Is your family rich?
If the answers are "No" and "No," there is a very good chance that this student will not graduate college.
The "inciting incident" that triggers the student to drop out, is usually an unexpected expense of less than $4000. This could be car trouble, medical bill, childcare, or some other emergency.
CS professors at any school with lots of Black students will confirm: The Black students that graduate with Computer science degrees are not necessarily the best CS students at the University. They are the best of the 40% that survived the economic hardship trap.
It is a harsh and unforgiving filter.
Removing economic hardship as a factor in dropping out, would almost double the US Black college graduation rate. But how to do that? Hold that thought and let's talk about sports economics.
The NBA makes revenue through ticket sales, sponsorship deals (Official pizza of the NBA!), Apparel licensing (Official NBA Jersey!), And selling TV broadcast rights. Of this revenue, the league must pay ~50% to players.
If you add up LeBron's and every other NBA player's pay, it's ~50% of $10 billion USD.
The NFL pays ~50% of its $18B revenue to players.
The NHL pays ~50% of its $2.5B revenue to players.
Now for my European friends, take the revenue of the English Premiere League. Add that to the revenue of the Bundesliga, and add that to the revenue of La Liga. US college sports generate more revenue than those European soccer leagues... combined.🤯
Somewhere between $18B and $20B depending on who's doing the math.
Almost all of this revenue is generated from football and basketball TV deals
One TV deal, for one sport (football), for one sub league, of only ~12 schools, is over a $1B a year of college sports revenue:
https://theathletic.com/3520740/2022/08/18/big-ten-college-football-tv-rights/
But players don't see any of that $9B. In the US, it is illegal to pay these mostly Black, mostly poor, college players. 🙃
The players get "athletic scholarships" instead. The sum total of which, comes to less than 2% of league revenues.
The "student athletes" (read: employees), don't even get workers compensation if they're injured.
But it gets worse.
Not only does the NCAA prohibit schools from paying players, the students are forbidden from paying themselves!
If your kid is in college, and they're hungry, I can buy them a $5 taco and bag of chips. Unless they are a college athlete. In which case me even buying them a $5 lunch is a violation, and they could lose their scholarship.🤡
The students are kept in artificial poverty, because they're easier to control, and dependent on the "gift" of an athletic scholarship.
But athletes like LeBron and Steph don't just make money by being paid by the NBA. They also get sponsorship deals, and can have other jobs (sports analyst, run sports camps, etc).
The Name, Image, and Likeness bill, says that colleges in California cannot restrict kids from having sponsorship opportunities. You don't have to pay the athletes. But you can't stop the athletes from paying themselves. 👍🏿
We did California first, for the same reason that environmentalists target California emissions standards first. California is big enough that car manufacturers can't ignore the state (e.g. Camry not available in California). And they're not going to make two different models of every car for the USA (e.g. California Camry vs normal Camry). So every car sold in the US, ends up meeting the stricter California standard. 👍🏿
And some states' standards are just copied off of California's homework.🤷🏿♂️
But again, what do rich athletes have to do with millions of Black college graduates? Millions of people don't play sports?
In the US, there is a "graduation halo" around Black athletes. 🤯
But it makes sense:
If your cousin plays for the Warriors, they are not letting you drop out of MIT just because you can't afford an unexpected $4000.
If your uncle plays for the Raiders, they're not letting you miss a semester sitting falsely accused in jail, because you can't afford bail.
How would the US change if we could transfer ~$9B a year to some of its poorest, most vulnerable people? We're already seeing the positive results of the NIL bills, as predicted.
We're also seeing direct increased graduation rates of athletes. A poor student whose family needs $20K, can stay in college and earn that money. Before NIL, that kid would have had to leave college early to enter the draft to earn anything. They wouldn't have graduated, and they would have earned millions less.
There's a common meme that Black athletes are bad with money, because they play in the NFL, and are broke 3 years after they leave the league.
I just showed you that Damar Hamlin's *lifetime earnings* from the NFL are ~$1.6MM. Let's call it $500K after tax, agent, and manager. And he is a provider for his extended family. He probably covered expenses for extended family of about $200K.
He has 10 years of living a $30K a year lifestyle.
Not debating if he should've "helped his family less."
People are trying to figure out a way to give Black folk reparations for money and wages stolen during slavery. A worthy cause. But I'm also trying to stop money and wages from still being stolen today! In 2023!
Black folk in the US don't need "charity" or "handouts." We need folks to stop stealing labor without compensation.
College sports is one multi-billion dollar a year chunk. Civil asset forfeiture is another multi-billion dollar a year chunk (but that's another thread).
Now that you know how important wealthy family is to graduating from college in the USA, you should understand why so many of the friends you graduated with from Ivy League schools, and MITs, and CalTech's, and Pomonas, were Nigerian. 🙋🏿♂️
It's not just that African parents focus on education. It's that it's *much* harder to graduate college without a family that can provide rainy day safety net coverage. Not just harder for Black kids. Harder for anyone. This system hurts white kids too.
Oh final point: Am I trying to destroy the NCAA? Am I trying to destroy college sports?
No.
Here's the ironic thing... when the dust settles on these changes, the NCAA will make *more* money than it does today.
LeBron James makes $111MM a year, but the NBA only pays him ~$50MM a year. He earns the rest himself. If the NBA has to pay him the full $111MM, they'd lose margin. If the NBA tried to restrict him from earning beyond $50MM, he would go play in Europe for $30MM and still total $91MM.
Black kids aren't stupid. They know the NCAA is exploitative, but have no viable alternative. So they stay for as little time as they can. Lots of college stars stay for only 1 year.🤦🏿♂️
If college wasn't such a horrendously racist bad deal, they'd stay for longer, and... college sports would earn more money! Zion could still be at Duke.
EA's Madden for NFL game generates billions in revenue for EA and the NFL. But they have to pay players.
NIL re-enables this for college
https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/35082744/ea-sports-release-college-football-game-summer-2024
@hschmale @mekkaokereke There's the overall NCAA org, which doesn't get much of the pie, then there are the conferences, like the Big 10 or the SEC, which have relatively small budgets for their orgs but most (all?) of which have redistribution clauses so that some of the money that the big winning schools make gets distributed to the schools that don't make money.
So even though Alabama and Georgia keep winning everything in the SEC, Vanderbilt gets some of their money.
@phaedral Similar, but not completely.
I don't believe "It's not race, it's class!" Because data shows that for most things it's both, with race being the bigger component.
I do believe in solving general problems instead of race specific ones. Because by doing so, groups that are disproportionately impacted by harm, will get corresponding disproportionate benefit.
Example: What if cops didn't shoot *anyone* next year? Everyone would benefit! But Black folk would benefit disproportionately.
@mekkaokereke It's both! We totally agree! The oppressor class, ruling class, whatever one calls it, tends to be pasty. (Like me, I might add, in full disclosure.)
I made my comment from the lens that capital keeps the races and genders and generations at war with each other to keep us from warring on capital. Does that track?
@phaedral @mekkaokereke If improving things for a specific class consistently has an outsize benefit for a racial subgroup of that class, AND that racial subgroup consistently has outsize representation in that class... it's not a class issue.
But don't let that stop you from working to improve things for the poorest classes, if thinking of it as a class issue helps you to rationalize the need to do the work.
@mekkaokereke can confirm! I was a white kid from a lower-middle-class family who nearly had to leave when the recession hiked tuition costs *after* I'd started my course (I ended up with a supplementary private student loan with a parent cosigner).
I studied in Scotland where tuition is free for Scottish students and knew folk whose grades suffered because they still needed to work full time to pay living costs.
It really isn't easy without a secure financial safety net for the full degree.
OMG THIS:
"Black folk in the US don't need "charity" or "handouts." We need folks to stop stealing labor without compensation."
YES.
@DeliaChristina @mekkaokereke Reparations is neither a charity nor a handout. Literally US economics has been built to exclude descendants of slavery.
We can not close the wealth gap through wages alone.
Boom! Yes. Both used by cops whenever they like against anyone they like, but rarely if ever against white people that have lawyers.
Whether that's racist or prudent is beside the point: that's exactly what structural racism is and how it works, mostly.
I am not #Black though I have #Solidarity with this. I grew up in the #Blind #Community and I knew about what was referred to as #ShelteredWorkshops where #Disabled people worked for #SubminimumWage
#Handouts are bad for many reasons (#Sympathy and #Pity are the opposites of #Empathy) and they #Enable #Unjust #Systems to continue.
@mekkaokereke I have to say there is another large chunk in wage theft where employers don't pay legally required overtime or underpay hours worked by requiring people not to correctly document their work hours. And it's also wage theft in my personal opinion when the company makes a huge profit and many of the workers don't earn a living wage. And then there is the wage theft where we actually pay black people (and others of color and women) less for doing the same jobs. And let us not forget the concept of meritocracy which is used to prove that white men are better. How do they rise to the top over everyone else in a "meritocracy" you ask? They get the better work assignments, the ones that are career enhancing. I watched this play out over and over for decades before I retired. Mediocre white men get better work assignments across the board than anyone not a white man.
Since they start out poorer, blacks are also disproportionally affected by these practices.
I appreciate your writing on equity and racism. Thanks
@msbellows Great questions!
On subsidizing sports: if we follow the money, we see that that's not actually true. The money from football is much bigger than the money to support the other sports, but the football money doesn't actually flow to those other sports. Which is a good thing! It's why schools that don't have profitable football programs (ie most colleges in the US), still have tennis teams.
But even if the money did flow that way, robbing poor Black kids to pay others? Is bad.
@msbellows On women in sports, something more interesting that the group predicted would happen, is happening.
Women's sports make *more* money in the NIL era than before it. Because women athletes are *more* endorsable than men. Not "as endorsable." More. Some of the highest earning athletes under NIL, are already women.
Women's sports are criminally under marketed.
Advertisers know that women make most of the buying decisions, and both men and women watch women's sports... when marketed.
@mekkaokereke is there any value in having been a college/pro player in regular life later? Vs say that guy who was pretty good on the local high school team?
Does name recognition go anywhere? Does it exist?
@frogfather Depends who you are.
If you're a rich white man, playing college ball can help you in politics. But looking like you could have played sports helps almost as much.🤷🏿♂️
For everyone else, no, it really, it doesn't help. People trying to tell you that football taught them some magic life lessons about "overcoming adversity" are full of it:
1) They're revealing that they think approximately zero women have this "valuable leadership skill."
2) Why aren't 70% of boardrooms Black then?🤔
I would like to see a timeline of when the various burdensome rules were adopted by the #NCAA ... as I'm a #ComputerNerd, I hadn't paid much attention.
Were I a gambler, I might bet there is a #correlation between #StudentAthletes being heavily penalized for these things with a rise of #BIPOC student athletes.
@tarheel 1) "Graduation Halo" refers to this phenomenon:
Consider an extended family of 50 Black folk in Mississippi. About 8 family units of cousins, nieces, etc, ranging in age from 2 years old to 84. Each family has the average income for a Black family in Mississippi. Five of the 50 relatives are currently enrolled in college. Each student has ~40% chance of graduating.
Now imagine one family member signs with the NY Knicks. All 5 college kids' probability of graduating just went up.🤯
@tarheel 2) Yes, the UNCF fund is great to donate to, as are other rainy day funds.
I will never bash any short term workaround for the issue facing poor Black families.👍🏿
We can do both. We can help Black families that are poor keep their kids enrolled in college, and we can reduce the racism that transfers money away from those Black families and makes it poor in the first place.
@owlislost @mekkaokereke It is.
In Germany it's kind of the other way around. It is a factor, if your familiy is rich or poor, but mostly (i think) because it often correlates to educated or not and the more academic your family, the more probable it is, that you will go to university.
On the other hand: we have a pretty high dropout rate because students are not "good enough", especially in STEM
@mekkaokereke Back in the day, TheWife had to jump through hoops to get permission to have a FT job in her field without running afoul of the NCAA.
She had to fight in order to have dispensation to make money to *feed herself*.
All of this to preserve the notion of the pristine "amateur" "student" athlete. Someone who does their sport for the pure love of the game. As if athletics isn't a business (for the colleges) and a career choice (for the students).
We don't require accounting students to "account" for the pure love of it.
Colleges just don't want to admit out loud that they are the minor leagues for almost every sport and get paid damned well for playing that role.
Exactly. I can hire a summer intern from Georgia Tech or Stanford and pay them for their labor, and no one complains. This doesn't diminish their "love of computers."
Dakota Fanning can release a movie while studying women's studies in college, and no one blinks. This doesn't diminish her love of women's studies.
It's only the one path that is predominantly Black kids, that we assign "purity" tests in a way that lets us get $9B a year of free labor.
NCAA athletes need to get paid. In many US states, a college football or basketball coach is the state's highest paid public employee.
THIS. :-) I think maybe in two states some sort of medical officer is the highest paid employee.
AND the state salary doesn't begin to count all the money the coach can be making in endorsements, appearance fees and who knows what.
I guess they don't love the sport all that much since we gotta pay them so much. 😉
Even if the athletes are on a scholarship, I'd imagine that that the demands of semi-professional football or basketball conflict with the demands for academic studies. So they aren't even getting the full value of their scholarship.
@mekkaokereke Wait, how does this work? Like, they're not allowed to own capital? What's the legal nuance? Like, what do the powers at be tell you when you raise to them that being forbidden from owning money amounts to slavery?
Btw I cannot thank you enough for these posts, they are extremely informative and pertinent.
You're welcome!
And to answer your question: they don't care.
Let me tell you how bad it used to be. Aaron Adair, a white male college baseball player, worked out a lot and lifted weights so that he could be big and strong to play baseball. Unfortunately, he was diagnosed with brain cancer, and had to stop training and playing, to undergo surgery and chemotherapy. He lost a lot of weight, but he beat the cancer! ♥️✊🏻
He had a dream to return to baseball. So he worked out hard, and with the support of his family and teammates, eventually made it back to baseball!
He wrote a book about his journey, from star athlete, to cancer diagnosis, to cancer survivor, to returning to the field, all at a young age.
https://www.abebooks.com/9781553955146/Know-Where-Been-Adair-Aaron-1553955145/plp
The book didn't even do that well. But... it made more than $0. So the NCAA said that he had violated the rules, by profiting from his own name, image, and likeness.
So they banned him from college baseball.😯
The law that we got passed, makes it so that the NCAA and colleges cannot stop students like Aaron from profiting from their own Name, Image and Likeness.
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