The Cost of a Bachelor’s Degree and the Great Value of an Athletic Scholarship
On this Labor Day, it is very clear that the real value of holding a bachelor’s degree has never been higher in our country, and unfortunately the cost of earning a college degree has never been higher. The high price of a college education means that an athletic scholarship has never been more valuable, and holding a college degree is the one sure path to prosperity in our Republic. With that in mind, it is time to end all of this talk about paying student-athletes for playing sports in college. Let’s take a look at what a bachelor’s degree actually costs in the real world for those of us that are saving for and even paying for college today.
A number of people in recent years have promoted the idea that college student-athletes, and especially football and basketball players should be paid for playing college sports. What the people that advocate for college athletes to get paid for their efforts seem to forget is that student-athletes already receive a number of benefits, including most importantly the costs associated with their college education. A number of us here at Coaches Hot Seat are saving for (or paying for right now) our children’s future college education costs utilizing various educational programs (529 plans, education savings accounts, etc.) and we often use calculators to determine the estimated future cost of earning a bachelor’s degree. We have recently run across an education calculator, the Sallie Mae Education Investment Planner, which allows users to calculate the cost of education very quickly into the future, and even for the current calendar year. Just to get an idea of what a college education costs and what it is worth to student-athletes on athletic scholarships, we ran the Sallie Mae Calculator on several different schools if a student was entering college in the fall of 2008 and earned a degree in 4 years and came up with the below numbers:
Cost of Earning a Bachelor’s Degree (4 years)
Public Universities
University of Georgia – $60,706
University of Texas – $71,705
Ohio State University – $76,355
Boise State University – $86,747
University of North Carolina – $97,409
University of Washington – $97,680
Penn State University – $102,186
Rutgers University – $134,799
Private Universities
Baylor University – $148,142
Vanderbilt University – $152,467
Wake Forest University – $197,205
Universityof Notre Dame – $200,060
Duke University – $206,059
Stanford University – $207,193
University of Southern California – $209,925
Boston College – $214,281
The first thing that has to jump out to anyone over the age of 40 that went to college is the astounding amount of money that it costs to attend college in this century. It is not cheap to run a large university or college, and to get a solid undergraduate education it takes a very large investment by parents, and student-athletes that are lucky enough to have earned an athletic scholarship should count themselves as very fortunate. Looking over these educational cost numbers it strikes us as very odd that anyone believes that there is not already a tremendous investment being made by schools to fund athletes’ undergraduate education. Paying student-athletes for their play? Please, student-athletes on an athletic scholarship are already receiving a tremendous benefit by having their undergraduate education paid for, and we have not even touched in this post on the more than $1.5 million plus dollars that a person with a college degree will earn in their lifetime over someone that just holds a high school diploma
For those parents out there, try out the Sallie Mae Education Investment Planner at: http://www.plan.salliemae.com/. Of course, with the high cost of an undergraduate education these days, it might be a good idea to get your kids into a sport that is played on the collegiate level!
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