It's almost that time of year again. March Madness is just around the corner, and with it comes excitement on campuses across the country as college basketball teams jockey for a spot in the final tournament. Here at Dartmouth, however, things are pretty quiet as usual. Sure, we will fill out our brackets when the time comes, and perhaps we even root for our hometown colleges or the alma maters of friends and family. We do so, however, with the sad understanding that we will not be writing the Big Green on any of those brackets any time soon.
But I'm not lamenting our basketball team's unfortunate standing within the Ivy League, which is entitled to one automatic spot in the NCAA final tournament but never commands much respect at the national level. Up until the miraculous rise of a certain New York Knicks point guard, no recent Ivy League basketball program had produced anything worth boasting about. And of course, Jeremy Lin is more of an exception than a sign that Ivy League teams are becoming nationally relevant in basketball or any other major sport. Our little athletic conference may be prestigious in other ways, but certainly not in actual athletics.
At the end of the day, Dartmouth and the rest of our Ivy peers lack nationally recognized teams because we choose to handicap ourselves by prohibiting athletic scholarships. When the Ivy League was formed in the 1940s, its members actually fielded quite a few top-ranked football and basketball teams. But our enlightened college presidents quickly chose to focus on academics rather than athletics and thus decided that scholarships should be given out on the basis of need alone. What they didn't realize was that colleges need not sacrifice athletics in order to maintain strong academics. Schools like Stanford University and Duke University, which didn't jump on the bandwagon of adamantly banning athletic scholarships, managed to foster powerhouse teams without compromising their academic reputations.
Since the 1940s, the nature of college athletics has also changed in a way that quashes some of the initial concerns about athletic scholarships. In the 1940s, colleges gave out far less financial aid than they do today, so it made some sense for academically-focused institutions not to waste the little scholarship funding they had available on sports. Nowadays, not only is more financial aid available, but some college athletic teams have also become so profitable that the revenue they generate is more than enough to finance their scholarships. Prestigious athletic conferences such as the Big 10 and SEC generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue each year, primarily from television deals, allowing funding for athletic scholarships to be entirely independent from need and merit-based aid. In fact, the money from the most profitable teams, football and basketball, is often used to support other sports. The result is an entirely self-sustaining athletic program that can ultimately save the university money.
Aside from the potential financial benefits, having top-ranked teams has obvious positive effects on a college's reputation, an issue perhaps most relevant to Dartmouth among our Ivy League brethren. Dartmouth is not a household name in comparison to some of our peers, but most argue that we are well-known among the "people who matter." However, we can do more to improve our name recognition among one group of people who definitely matter: potential applicants. Dartmouth has a lot to offer, but a high school student may immediately brush Dartmouth aside because he or she has never heard of it. On the other hand, the same student might give schools like Duke and Notre Dame University a closer look simply because he or she is familiar with the name through college sports.
Imagine just how excited and supportive alumni, students and prospective students would be if our basketball team made it to the NCAA finals. It's possible. We managed to do so once upon a time in 1944 one year before the Ivy League instituted the official ban on athletic scholarships that has prevented us from doing so since.
