Row for Dough

The New York Times ran a story on how most expectations for collegiate sports scholarships will be unfulfilled. A guy named Steve Sailer crunched some numbers and came up with the expected value of playing a high school sport for the average student. He divided the number of athletic scholarship dollars given in a sport by the number of high school athletes competing in that sport. So obviously, the immensely talented high school athlete who actually gets one of those scholarships receives well above the average. But someone whose talents are, say, more in the range of ducking out of the way of a thrown ball because that thing's headed right for my head -- well, we would receive below the average. Like zero, for example.

So it turns out that the best way to pay for your kid to get a college education is to have a daughter and teacher her how to row crew. That'll earn her almost ten grand towards the ol' room and board. And chances are pretty good the team coach and team members will come after her to get her to join. At the college where I used to work, pretty much any woman who looked athletic and strong heard from the coach or another crew member at least once.

You might also teach little Sally to pick up a sword, which could earn her about three grand towards school on the fencing team, as well as offering a handy deterrent for those overly amorous, morally latitudinous and alcohol-fortified fraternity boys.

Of course, this may not sound right -- we hear about how university football programs run through multi-millions of dollars each year, amounts which could give every D-1 football player in the country his own tenured tutor and ensure they could all read their commitment letters. But as Sailer notes, more than a million kids play high school football, and the actual annual amount of scholarship money passed out by those programs is just over $367 million. Hey -- that six million dollars for a coach who can't win BCS games has gotta come from somewhere.