Kirk O. Hanson and Mark Savage have prepared useful and provocative materials on the broad topic of ethics in sports, and have posted them over at the excellent Markkula Center for Applied Ethics site.
It’s one of my favorite topics, and with Lance Armstrong finally shedding his mask, that Penn State scandal and surprise steroid suspensions in Major League Baseball, it has never been more current. These four essays, presented under the heading, Sports Ethics: Matching the Issues, can be found here:
Ethics Alarms 
After observing college athletics for 20 years, I have a much more cynical view of them than Hanson and Savage. What I have seen is not so clearly described in the Ann Arbor News’ investigative series on the matter. The link below goes to one of the last articles in the series, with links to the previous articles on the right hand side.
http://www.mlive.com/wolverines/academics/stories/index.ssf/2008/03/academic_success_follows_narro.html
These articles basically show that the academic path of a “student’-athlete at a major school is a shell game designed to keep them academically eligible and on a graduation path at all costs. That may not sound like a bad thing until you see how they do it.
To begin with, the athletes can’t be admitted to U of M’s main college (LS&A) because their grades and test scores are not even close to competitive. Instead, they are admitted through the program in kinesiology, which is classified as separate from LS&A so it can have lower admission standards. Because the athletes can’t compete with non-athletes who might try to get admitted via this route, half of their slots are reserved for scholarship athletes.
Once admitted to kinesiology, the students can’t stay there. Michigan’s sports management degree was revamped to become a nationally competitive degree, so the coursework is too difficult. They instead are transferred to LS&A (that they couldn’t be admitted to because of admission standards) to the General Studies degree. They need to major in general studies because the minimum degree requirements have been stripped out of this particular major to allow athletes to graduate. All LS&A degrees require 9 credit hours of science or math classes and fourth term foreign language proficiency. When the athletes couldn’t stay in sports management any longer, those requirements were stripped from general studies and general studies only.
Now that they are in general studies, they need to take classes and pass them. To do that, academic advisors have identified classes with minimum academic content from across the university. As general studies majors, they can take any classes anywhere and mix them for their degree. They take education “experience” classes where they can read children’s books in elementary school classrooms for credit (often multiple times for credit) or they take independent studies classes from a sympathetic psychology professor. That professor taught 250 independent studies classes for athletes in 3 years. Those classes mainly consisted of how to use a day planner, how to organize their day, and how to study. The athletes often took multiple independent studies classes from him. No one disputes what went on in the classes, but the professor and the administration insist that this is appropriate work for upper-level psychology credit.
What kind of education are these so-called students getting? In the interviews, you can see the athletes in many cases weren’t even given a choice in their area of concentration, they were told what to take and when to take it. No thought was ever given to how these classes or their education would help them after their athletic career was over.
How can this system be ethical?