Scholarship shortfalls persist, leaving NCAA scholarship student-athletes to pay hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars for additional educational expenses not covered by their current athletic scholarships. Meanwhile, NCAA campuses continue to generate money from the sale of apparel and other merchandise featuring star athletes. In this detailed study, Ernest Cutler explores the troubling history of money changing hands, with none of it going to student athletes who are for some reason considered amateurs that should not be eligible for payment. He also takes a careful look about what such a system says about academic values and educational institutions, as well as how the system contributes to infractions by student-athletes, coaches, and athletic administrators. This research study is not intended to disrespect the NCAA, but it does seek to serve as a tool to change problematic policies that infringe upon the rights of current, former, and future student athletes.

Beer and Circus presents a no-holds-barred examination of the troubled relationship between college sports and higher education from a leading authority on the subject. Murray Sperber turns common perceptions about big-time college athletics inside out. He shows, for instance, that contrary to popular belief the money coming in to universities from sports programs never makes it to academic departments and rarely even covers the expense of maintaining athletic programs. The bigger and more prominent the sports program, the more money it siphons away from academics. Sperber chronicles the growth of the university system, the development of undergraduate subcultures, and the rising importance of sports. He reveals television's ever more blatant corporate sponsorship conflicts and describes a peculiar phenomenon he calls the "Flutie Factor"--the surge in enrollments that always follows a school's appearance on national television, a response that has little to do with academic concerns. Sperber's profound re-evaluation of college sports comes straight out of today's headlines and opens our eyes to a generation of students caught in a web of greed and corruption, deprived of the education they deserve. Sperber presents a devastating critique, not only of higher education but of national culture and values. Beer and Circus is a must-read for all students and parents, educators and policy makers.

In The Miseducation of the Student Athlete: How to Fix College Sports, Kenneth L. Shropshire and Collin D. Williams, Jr., introduce The Student-Athlete Manifesto, a roadmap to increase the likelihood that student-athletes can succeed both on and off the field. They also offer a Meaningful Degree Model, which ensures education pays for everyone.

Many books have been written on the evils of commercialism in college sport, and the hypocrisy of payments to athletes from alumni and other sources outside the university. Almost no attention, however, has been given to the way that the National Collegiate Athletic Association has embraced professionalism through its athletic scholarship policy. Because of this gap in the historical record, the NCAA is often cast as an embattled defender of amateurism, rather than as the architect of a nationwide money-laundering scheme. Sack and Staurowsky show that the NCAA formally abandoned amateurism in the 1950s and passed rules in subsequent years that literally transformed scholarship athletes into university employees. In addition, by purposefully fashioning an amateur mythology to mask the reality of this employer-employee relationship, the NCAA has done a disservice to student-athletes and to higher education. A major subtheme is that women, such as those who created the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW), opposed this hypocrisy, but lacked the power to sustain an alternative model. After tracing the evolution of college athletes into professional entertainers, and the harmful effects it has caused, the authors propose an alternative approach that places college sport on a firm educational foundation and defend the rights of both male and female college athletes. This is a provocative analysis for anyone interested in college sports in America and its subversion of traditional educational and amateur principles.

A SWAGGER can't be acquired by material objects. It comes from a source deep within that you may have never known you possessed. The swagger never lets circumstance or criticism interrupt the mission. But what happens when your uncommon dream doesn't go as planned -your business fails, tragedy hits, you make a bad decision, your marriage goes down hill, your athletic aspirations don't pan out, or you're in a job that just doesn't do it for you? You see with every little hiccup in life you lose energy, excitement and drive. YOU LOSE YOUR SWAGGER! These are the stories rarely discussed by the mainstream sports media - stories that will empower your walk through life, show you what mental toughness really means, and give YOU a SWAGGER!

Provides information for Teens about planning, saving, and paying for post-secondary education, with facts about government aid, private loans and scholarships, and other sources of financial assistance. Includes index and resource information