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College Offers Athletic Scholarships To Gamers
New submitter MdotCpDeltaT writes: Robert Morris University will be the first school in the country to offer athletic scholarships to students who play the video game League of Legends. It's a move that seems to stretch the definition of sports and athletes. Associate athletic director Kurt Melcher said, "It's a team sport. There's strategy involved. You have to know your role in the game. Obviously it's not cardiovascular in any way, but it's mental. There are elements that go into it that are just like any other sport."The article says, "Though the gaming scholarships are primarily designed to attract what the school calls an 'underserved male' population, they are open to all, and Melcher said some women have inquired about the program. Even if the awards end up going mostly to males, he added, it should not upset the school's scholarship gender balance, which already has strong participation in women's sports."
Why not some other team-based game?
There's hundreds.
Great, I just wish they would extend it to a game that is actually interesting to watch.
I liked it better when people at least pretended to make sense.
I just want to point out that Starcraft II is a game built upon the fundamental rules of military history and strategy; its solutions and outcomes rather closely model thousands of years of human land battles. MarineKing really can teach viewers about the military concepts of mass, maneuver, observation, surprise, initiative, the choice of raiding or persisting in the enemy's territory, and so on.
League of Legends and its infinite DOTA clones are spell-casting twitch games, with a physically limited grade-school level of strategy and combat being merely a series of counter-spells. These games have little to no relation to the real world and do not generate useful information for spectators.
I just wanted all of you to know that there is an actual reason why Starcraft is the superior game and spectator sport. This is what permits myself and others to say with authority, "LoL sucks."
That is the issue so basically if you want to play there you have to pay the other half? per year? and why can't you rent on your own and save?
But 38,000 + books and other fees an year is why student loans are so big now days.
Even people in this for 4 years are looking at about 76000 + books and other fees that can be like 100K with loan fees and interest.
They found something even more pathetic than athletic scholarships.
This will likely have mostly male applicants, and put pressure on the school to attract and spend more on females in other areas. They'll either have to shut down other male dominated sports, or find more funding to balance the equation for the women.
Just another day in Paradise
Video gaming might be a sport, (in a similar way to which chess is a sport) but its not athletic
There are chess scholarships.
Who cares whether it's used by males or females? It's open to everyone and the skill requirement can obviously be measured independently from the sex. Why the hell does everything have to be genderfied these days? It should not play any role in a debate like this.
Wrong thread?
Bad for the educational system at a time when both sides and more are at issue.
We have big ncaa student athlete issues (and at least some of the player should be in some kind of minor ledge system) also some of the students are not college material and should be some kind of tech / trades program. Also when you are doing team stuff 40-60 hours a week you don't have time for classes.
On the other side we have issues with skill gaps, cost , big blocks of time, college credit transfer issues (some student athletes are year to year) , and so on in the over all college system.
This is the main reason. Many mid-tier colleges are seeing enrollment numbers drop. This gets them in the news when people are thinking about college applications next year, and provides a way to bring in additional revenue (an unfilled seat is basically lost revenue since most costs are fixed).
and after the courts rule on ncaa student athlete issues the fail out may force schools to rethink stuff even things like this.
This is completely off topic but, being in Europe, I've often wondered why would people study in the US when they could get the same education in Europe for under a tenth of the price. I can understand language being a barrier but... a hundreds of thousands of dollars barrier?
There are certainly many reasons not to do it, but it's a loan I suppose some people take decades to pay so...
My total student loans (books, food, rent, tuition, entertainment, travel, new computers, etc) at a Swedish top university was about $50k for a 5-year programme. Or about 1.5 years of tuition at this rate...
last i read only a minority of people in europe go to college, unlike the USA
don't go to college far from home, go to your state school and live with mom and dad
you're crazy if you think society should pay for 4 years of your living expenses
Unless your state school happens to be out of cycling distance from where your parents currently live.
So what does the school plan to do with the student athletes once the game's publisher shuts down the multiplayer servers? Or if the publisher brings legal action against the school for allowing matches to be televised in violation of the game's copyright?
Not League of Legends, LOL as in laughing out loud.
society should have more tech and trades schools as well community colleges with HS level costs and 100% transfer.
"athletic"
I think you are not aware of how amazingly vast most of the United States are. Unless you live in a major city, you are going to need to move to go to a university.
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Unless your state school happens to be out of cycling distance from where your parents currently live.
Live in the dorms. That's what I did. My total college expenses (including living expenses) ended up being only ~$30,000 for all four years.
I think you are not aware of how amazingly vast most of the United States are. Unless you live in a major city, you are going to need to move to go to a university.
I lived in a small village. There were 2,500 residents plus about that again in students attending our local 4-year university. The same island had 5 other universities plus some junior colleges and trade techs. Different parts of the country invest differently.
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It's even worse with video games. In a traditional sport, if players or clubs grow tired of one league, they can start their own league to play the same game, and no publisher has veto power over anyone forming a new league with the proverbial blackjack and sex therapists. This is why college has both NCAA and NAIA, why pro baseball had both NL and AL, why pro American football had both NFL and AFL before they merged soon after what is now known as the first Super Bowl, and why pro basketball had the NBL, the BAA, and the ABA. It's also why the ruling in favor of The Tetris Company in Tetris v. Xio is so detrimental to Tetris creator and The Tetris Company co-founder Alexey Pajitnov's dream of seeing Tetris become an internationally competitive sport.
I think international enrollment may very well start to be a thing.
But I would point out that in Europe, there's people crossing countries on a daily basis just commuting to work, while in the US, there are families who haven't left the country except for brief vacations, or not at all. Living in the US is all they know, and all they want, and the parents are already twisted up inside about having their kids leave home, to consider sending them halfway around the world adds to their stress.
For many years college has been seen as the indispensable class gateway to access the middle-class life. No introductory price could be high enough to offset the prosperity the graduates would see on in their career. This vision changed VERY suddenly: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
The cost of college grew at a lightning pace since the time the parents had gone to college, the kids had never dealt in financial matters, and the intangible debts accrued were a problem for the future when the kids would already be enjoying a successful career that would allow them to pay it down...except that with the recent financial crisis and recent-graduate employment rates falling off a cliff as recently laid-off middle-age workers are taking up entry-level positions, the young graduates found themselves with significant debt but without the middle-class career path they'd counted on to help pay down that debt. I think that international enrollment will indeed grow in response to this problem unless something else is done to address it. It's just that this problem had hit so suddenly that the culture of choosing colleges hasn't shifted quickly enough to keep up. Colleges transformed from a gold mines to minefields in a short time span. We're seeing the opinions shifting now though.
It's important to bear in mind that the massive spike in tuition is at least, a progressive pricing structure (though it has its flaws and gaps). US colleges defend their pricing by saying that the ridiculously high tuition is the list price that gets charged to the more affluent families, and that inflated price helps allow for tuition discounts to the less affluent families to get into the college.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money...
There is some nuance to that pricing structure. TL;DR, if a student goes to a reputable STEM college to major in STEM, then that high tuition is funding the salaries of famous professors and their projects that make your STEM college reputable (and your degree as well). If a student goes to that college to major in art history, they're probably going to get a very bad deal out of it.
Not everyone pays 100k for their college education. My bachelor's cost me $40,000 total(of which I owe $2,000 more), and that included all expenses(food, rent, books, etc). The tuition of my masters degree costs $34,000, since it's from a more prestigious school, but I won't be paying much of that out of my own pocket. I expect to get loans for, at most, 7,500 of that. Once I have my masters I'll easily be able to pay that off in a year or two.
The people who accrue 100k in loans for tuition are insane or stupid, in my opinion. There are plenty of cheap schools in the US that offer the same quality of education you can receive elsewhere.
It's also worth noting(source below) that the average student loan debt is something like $24k. People at the $100k range are outliers, not the norm. Most college students aren't the most frugal
http://www.asa.org/policy/resources/stats/
High tuition seems to have very little to do with the number of students but everything to do with services/administration bloating and the policy of "you get a loan! you get a loan!" policy from the US government. One would think with more students, you would achieve better economy of scale and so be able to charge less per student.
Looking at this: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/..., it seems countries can have a high percentage of college-educated people without charging them a lifetime of debt.
This is a marketing gimmick.
Scholarship money is heavily designed to give the student the idea of a "price break" when making a choice in school. Now this school is adding a bullshit scholarship to play video games to lure a lot of students there with the idea that "Oh, I can play video games and get paid!"
No, you're not getting paid for it. You are getting a coupon for the university so they get your business, rather than you choosing another university that might be a better fit, or cheaper for you.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Because apart from a few top tier schools the education isn't as good. Look at a list of the best colleges in the world and the US crushes everybody else. Sure there are bad colleges here as well, but we have a disproportionate number of quality institutions of higher learning. Most foreign exchange students come here because the college education you get in the US is better than what they have available to them back home.
http://www.ulinks.com/topuniversities.htm The US has 17 of the top 20 schools in the world and you have to get to the 50th best before the rest of the world starts to be competitive.
Sure, European colleges are cheap or free, but you're not guaranteed a spot the way that you are in the US. Literally anybody can go to college here, as long as they can find funds to pay.
Unlike the under-qualified athletes who get scholarships to schools with strong academics, this is a school where they can probably keep up just fine. I don't mean to sound disparaging (and since I live nearby, I have met good people who went there), but it is not a good school.
I mean, look at their wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Morris_University_(Illinois). When was the last time you saw a university wikipedia page that didn't once mention Academics? Notable Alumni? Literally the only meaningful section is about sports.
Bottles.
Nope. Other than Spain and Canada, which are way beyond, the US and the rest of Europe countries are all in a 10% wide span.
You can have updated info by searching "college and university education mismatch oecd"
There are other sports schools and the said thing is HR will take the some from a well known sports school over some one who was more real skills and or went to tech / trade school.
I was talking in general about educational system where the non student athletes have skill gaps in there classes with to much theory vs real skills.
These kinds of scholarships are completely marketing BS anyway. Give them out for any reason whatsoever. Like car insurance, I get a "discount" for just about anything.. but only 1, I can't stack them (since they have such a long list the sales person can choose from to make you feel special.)
Sports have no place in college. period. It is simply embarrassing the way we irrationally defend them. Just say you do it because you like the sport and want an excuse to get young men to play and prep for the pro sport (ok, and a few women for the few successful sports they have... and no! we do not need equality; it is bad enough we do this crap for the men.)
So if you want to equate video games with sports; go right ahead. They are equally meaningless recreational activities with no academic purpose whatsoever. Teamwork and thinking on the spot-- just a rationalization to pull something of merit out of it-- it has nothing to do with why sports programs exist. (if that is the excuse then tons of things are equivalent, including being in a GANG. probably more thought goes on in a criminal gang...)
In the USA, your state college funding is actually influenced by how well a college football team does. seriously! (not by ticket sales, it's the legislature doing it.)
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