In the wake of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, a debate started about whether student-athletes at Div. 1 schools deserve pay for their contributions to their schools. Tele-vision contracts, free apparel and equipment, merchandise sales and ticket sales in men’s D1 football and basketball make up a multi-billion dollar industry. The more competitive schools generate large incomes to recruit even more talented players or to build that new stadium they “need” so badly.

In return, these student athletes get free or heavily reduced tuition to some of the best schools in the country, along with great medi-cal care, meals, housing and access to the best training facilities known to man. Now, some prominent people, such as Ohio State University Athletic Director Gene Smith, are saying it’s not enough. In an interview with USA Today, Smith said athletes could use ex-tra money for clothing, gas money, furnishing apartments and “simply going out.” Another

advocate of paying student athletes is ESPN analyst and former college basketball star Jalen Rose, who wrote an article for the Huffington Post last month contending that collegiate athletes should be given a stipend of $2,000 per semester to keep up with the cost of living.

It sounds fair enough when one considers how much revenue college athletics bring in for these schools, but is it ethical to pay college athletes for an extracurricular activity that should come after schoolwork? The line between professional and collegiate athletes is becoming incredibly blurred by institutions which, at least nominally, put academic ex-cellence first on their list of priorities. At the University of Georgia 73.5 percent of athletes were special admits, meaning they did not meet the traditional academic requirements for enrollment at the school, compared to a mere 6.6 percent among the general student population, according to a study at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. That same study found that D1 colleges with the highest admission standards, such as Georgia Tech and UCLA, had the biggest gaps between SAT averages for athletes and the rest of the student body.

I’m not implying athletes are stupid. Some of the smartest people I’ve known have been athletically talented, but scholarships should be given to scholars, not people biding their time until they are drafted into the pros. There needs to be stricter academic stan-dards for athletes to compete. Many of these athletes need to stop taking for granted their admission into some of the best universities

in the country because the reality is many of them won’t go pro. Then, they’ll be stuck with a degree in some blow-off major, unable to succeed in the world outside sports.

If athletes receive a cut from the sale of their jerseys or free shoes from Nike, that’s fine. But colleges should not pay their athletes for the prestige they bring to the school any more than we are paid for the high average ACT scores and GPA’s Truman uses as a sales pitch for prospective students. That is to say, they should receive nothing more than the already incredible benefits of their scholarships to prestigious schools.

There is something to be said for ama-teurism in collegiate sports, something much more inspirational than what we’ve devel-oped over the last few decades. The situ-ation is not dissimilar from the Olympics, where the medals seem to convey so much more when you found out that the person on the podium was an electrician or a school teacher in the real world. We’ve lost sight of that in our crusade for harder, faster and bigger in the world of college athletics, and maybe it’s time to see a star quarterback or point guard with a degree in bio-chemistry or classical literature instead of the future first round draft pick that’s just killing time before they go pro.

Maybe it’s just me, but I always get the feeling my parents were more independent than I am when they were my age.

I always hear about people of past gen-erations working their way through college and supporting themselves during and after school. I’ve always kind of loved that image of the hardworking student who actually works outside of the classroom. I realize there are people who do this now, that some students have had the financial umbilical cord snipped and are going it alone through the jungle of bills and tuition payments. This is not the case for most of the people I know, including myself.

I’m not completely convinced the blame rests wholly upon this generation of stu-dents’ shoulders. Seven and a half million of the 10 million American college students will have one or more internships before their graduation, according to the College Employ-ment Research Institute. Seventy-five per-cent is a big chunk of the whole and seems to signify that students are trying to get their foot in the door of the so-called American workforce, so the question remains why stu-dents aren’t able to save up money and use it the way their parents did.

One reason could be that only 34 percent of internships posted online by colleges and universities offer monetary compensation for intern work, according to a New York Times article from March 25, 2011. This sticks students in a double bind of the worst kind, seeing as many today view an intern-ship as a prerequisite for a job in a related field. To have an internship, these students most likely will have to work a summer at a full-time job with an income sum of a giant goose egg.

Making this more difficult is the fact that most universities back these intern-ship programs, handing out information about them in their career centers and en-

couraging students to apply for a position they won’t be paid for. In return, schools offer a few credit hours for the intern-ship. It is this agreement between higher institutions of learning and companies of-fering unpaid internships that allows these businesses to evade laws from the United States Department of Labor that requires employees to be paid for work, according to another New York Times article of April 2, 2011. In fact, many internship programs require the student to use it for college credit, which makes sense in light of the aforementioned agreement.

This doesn’t seem so bad — give some credit hours to a student who decides to work in a field related to his or her studies for the summer, right? Wrong. Not only is the internship unpaid, students still are required to pay for the credit hours they earned dur-ing the internship. So in a number of cases, students have paid upwards of $2,000 to work for the summer.

In any other situation, what would we call this type of behavior? Ah, yes — exploitation. Here it just becomes overlooked.

While it is a crime to be taking some-one’s honest time and work and refusing to pay them for it or making them pay for it

in a roundabout way, this type of behavior increases the gap in privileges that already exist based on students’ parental financial situation. Some students’ parents have enough money for their children to pay a couple thousand dollars to volunteer for a summer at an internship. Students who don’t have this opportunity have to work somewhere that actually pays, which might not be at an internship, robbing them of networking opportunities and experience in their chosen field.

The bottom line is internships are a great way for students to become acquainted with an industry or to network. However, universities are not doing us any favors by offering credit in place of compensation. Breaking off these agreements or changing them in some way that makes them more educational and beneficial for students ul-timately would be doing a service to future alumni, which in turn, helps the universi-ties. A spin on “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.”

opinionsThursday, April 7, 2011 5

Unpaid internships cost more than are worth

Connor Riley is a junior history major

from St. Louis, Mo.

Texting in class inhibits learning possibilities

Anna Meier is a seniorEnglish major

from Kansas City, Mo.

Hannah Douglas

Connor Riley

“No, I have to work, but otherwise I would have

considered it.”

Anna Irwinjunior

around the Quad

Are you planning on attending Trumania?

“Maybe, I haven’t heard Chingy in a while, but he is from St. Louis so I need to

represent.”

Allan Hollingsworthfreshman

“No, I’m not a big fan of Chingy.”

Zach Esperanzasenior

“Probably not, I’m going out of town, and it just doesn’t

sound too interesting.”

Lisa Adamssophomore

Hannah Douglas is a seniorcommunication major

from Springfield Ill.

Anna Meier

NCAA athletes shouldn’t be paid to go to school

They sit slouched with one arm under the desk and a head that bobs throughout the lecture. I have a couple of them in my classes — maybe you have encountered a few. I’m talking about Truman texters.

Well, we’re on to you, you tech-laden “learners.” Seriously, we all can see you. Your professors and your peers — we all know you aren’t fascinated with your knees. It’s clear you aren’t devoting your full at-tention to the class topic either. So, what are you doing here then?

There’s a certain amount of phone etiquette that should exist today. A reason-able and respectful person wouldn’t place a call during class. Texting should follow the same rules, at least to some extent.

I know sometimes a cellphone can shine like gold. The envelope that gleams and flashes on your phone’s screen to signify a new text message is more appealing than anything a professor and a PowerPoint pre-sentation could offer.

Students who text in class are throwing money away. The average cellphone user spends $600 per year, according to consum-erreports.org, whereas Truman in-state tuition is more than $6,000 a year. It seems mean-ingless to toss such a large sum of money at something you’re ignoring. That additional “0” on your annual tuition bill represents the opportunity of a higher education — an invaluable commodity a cellphone won’t provide. Sorry, cellphone companies.

A couple of months ago, the U.S. De-partment of Health and Human Services conducted a survey with 1,043 students at the University of New Hampshire about texting in class. It turns out that although half of the students felt guilty about it, two-thirds of the students text at least once during a class period. Half of the students surveyed said texting in class distracted them. There’s a surprise.

I don’t care if you’re the president of the United States or just president of an organization on campus. Nothing is that im-portant. Even President Barack Obama puts down his Blackberry occasionally.

For those who subscribe to the emer-gency text message system, you don’t even have to turn your cell phone off. Just put it down. We shouldn’t become victims to our technology, no matter how pleasant it is to see a new message in the inbox.

This doesn’t just apply to college stu-dents. High school students have jumped on the texting bandwagon during class, too, and each high school has a different ap-proach for how to enforce putting away the phone while at school. One teacher in Pasco County, Florida asks her students to text in class to create a live poll generated by the texts the students send using the website polleverywhere.com, according to a report done by the American Broadcast Company.

Perhaps loosening texting restrictions worked in this scenario, but there has to be a balance between teacher and student. If a teacher loosens the texting rulebook, the student needs to return the favor. Show-ing a little interest and enthusiasm in class might help.

I’m not anti-texting. I think advances in technology can only allow for a better edu-cational environment. However, until class has ended, put your phone away. I will too.

Rent

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Going out

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