GOOD IDEA IN 1972, BUT IT'S TIME TO RE-EXAMINE TITLE IX
KC Sports & Fitness ,November 2009
By John Landsberg
The freshman girl was in line signing up for her first college classes and buying books. As she walked by a table of young women she was stopped and asked if she was interested in joining the school’s female rowing team.
“I never heard of a rowing team,” she replied nicely. “I have no idea how to row.”
“Don’t worry,” she was told. “We will teach you how to row and you can be on the team. Oh, and I can pretty much guarantee you’ll get a full scholarship.”
Her father was stunned. These girls just offered his daughter a full scholarship to be on a rowing team? A scholarship to participate in a sport she just learned of minutes earlier?
Title IX in action.
The radio commercial encouraged people to get excited about women’s basketball at the University of Kansas. It highlighted that SEASON tickets for KU women’s basketball would cost $48. I thought I had heard it wrong. Did the commercial just say it was $48 for 18 home basketball games? All of $2.67 per game? That wouldn’t cover the expenses of turning the lights on at the Fieldhouse.
Thank you Title IX.
On the other hand, the cheapest tickets for 21 KU men’s home basketball games would be $855 for a single seat (not including a required generous donation to the Williams Fund). That’s $41 to sit in pigeon heaven at Allen Fieldhouse (and don’t forget the extra “donation”).
Those are just a few examples why it is time for our elected officials to look at the silliness of the famous Title IX legislation that was originally created in 1972 designed to equalize scholarships between men’s and women’s sports teams on college campuses. Somewhere along the line things have gone very, very wrong with it.
Title IX is now making things more unequal for male athletes than ever before. Football is the nation’s most popular collegiate sport and is a cash cow for athletic departments. It also supplies the funding for most other sports, enhances a school’s national profile and it energizes the alumni base.
However, since Division I football programs have three times as many male scholarships (85) as any other sport, athletic departments in financial distress are sometimes forced to cut other men’s sports to remain in compliance with Title IX. One solution might be to eliminate football scholarships from the entire Title IX equation since it is a unique revenue-generating endeavor.
Title IX assumes that there is an equal level of interest in sports between men and women, and thus tries to proportion participation in college athletics based on undergraduate enrollment. However, in a noble attempt to level the playing field 37 years ago, it has created new inequities, undermining the importance of all sports.
In a nutshell, Title IX is totally unfair. Whereas the major revenue sports at most colleges involves either men’s basketball or football---which require years of training---many colleges are literally begging girls to take scholarships. Whereas a men’s baseball team might have a handful of scholarships to divide up for the entire team, it is very likely every women’s baseball team player has a full ride.
At many colleges men’s sports like swimming, wrestling, track and field and cross country have been completely eliminated, while many scholarships for women actually go unused. At the University of Miami three men’s sports were dropped while the school couldn’t even get enough women interested in such sports as equestrian, crew, golf, lacrosse and water polo.
Title IX sounded like one of those pious equality laws that sounded good in theory when it was developed, but today it simply doesn’t work. Today most colleges are predominantly female as many men can no longer afford tuition costs. Without scholarship money, many male athletes are forced to drop out.
According to USA Today, there are more men than women ages 18-24 in the USA — 15 million vs. 14.2 million. But nationally, the male/female ratio on college campuses today is 43/57, a reversal from the late 1960s and well beyond the nearly even splits of the mid-1970s.
Title IX was one of those laws that was designed to provide equity in sports. Instead, it has now become a symbol of inequity for male students. It is time for our elected officials to take a long hard look at this ridiculous law and either fix it or drop it entirely.
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