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In a few weeks, the Florida Gators and Oklahoma Sooners will face off on college football's biggest stage in the Bowl Championship Series' National Championship game. Unfortunately, many of the college seniors playing in this game will not be walking across the graduation stage next May. Instead, their schools will revel in the short-term glory of gridiron success, while the players will have to face the long-term consequences of joining the workforce without a college degree. 

Big-time college sports teams are not only skilled on the field, they are also talented at keeping their off-the-field activities in the dark. Athletics programs, for example, are experts at keeping their budgets under wraps. As spending on college sports soars to towering new heights, faculty members, students, taxpayers, and policymakers are often clueless about how the money is being spent.

The first step toward genuine college sports reform must be greater transparency -- in academic outcomes, as I argued last week -- and also in athletics budgets and expenditure decisions. While we have anecdotes about extravagant spending, the lack of transparency makes it difficult to know the extent of the problem. In addition, the NCAA's revenue distribution and scholarship rules encourage the professionalization of sports teams by emphasizing the value of athletic performance over academic achievement.

The NCAA -- or Congress if necessary -- must require the disclosure of more detailed information about athletic spending. The NCAA must also modify its own spending rules in order to slow down the college sports arms race and ensure that all athletes have the financial support they need to finish a degree.

I've been a huge fan of college sports for as long as I can remember. If I had to pick my all-time favorite activity for a Saturday afternoon, it would be attending a college football or basketball game. But in recent years, I started to realize that college athletics is not exactly the idealized extracurricular activity of talented students that I had imagined as a child.

When I entered the higher education policy world as a writer for Higher Ed Watch two years ago, I wanted to learn more. What I found was not pretty, and I was soon struggling to figure out how college sports had lost its way, and how policymakers could steer it back in the right direction.

Now, my time on the sports beat at Higher Ed Watch is drawing to a close. Before departing the higher education blog world, I wanted to revisit my recommendations for reforming college athletics. I understand that change will not come quickly or easily, but I do believe that demanding greater accountability from colleges for the academic performance of their athletes could significantly improve the way sports programs currently do business.

My Changing View of College Sports

When I set out to investigate the nexus between college athletics and academics, I quickly found myself immersed in appalling graduation rates and stories of academic corruption. It wasn't difficult to lay bare the dirty, profit-driven side of the college athletics world. But as visible as the problems were, few people seemed to care. Outside of isolated exposés and a few dedicated professors, there weren't very many serious efforts at reform.

The Washington Post reports that D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee is taking steps to end teacher seniority preferences in the District's teachers union contract, as part of ongoing contract negotiations with the Washington Teachers' Union.

With all of the talk about the commercialization of college sports, there is a common assumption that university athletics programs pay for themselves. A new report from the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) reveals, however, that most Division I schools are actually footing a significant part of the bill for their sports teams. The report also shows the amount colleges are spending on athletics has been rising rapidly, raising questions for students, faculty members, and taxpayers about colleges' priorities (hint, hint: we're talking about extravagant athletics facilities and sky-rocketing coaching salaries here).

In its new spending report, the NCAA, for the first time, provides a break down of the revenue that intercollegiate athletics programs receive -- distinguishing between those earned by the sports teams themselves ("generated revenue") and those that the colleges provide to the programs ("allocated revenue"). The NCAA's decision to provide these breakdowns represents an important step forward for athletic spending transparency in that it allows us to see the extent to which colleges are subsidizing their sports programs.

However, the usefulness of the report is limited as it discloses only aggregate numbers. As a result, we are left in the dark about how this is playing out institution by institution. At Higher Ed Watch, we believe that the federal government needs to strengthen its institutional reporting requirements on athletics spending, because it doesn't appear that the NCAA is willing to expose its members to that type of scrutiny anytime soon.

Over at our sister blog, Early Ed Watch, Sara Mead has a post on two new studies that try to estimate the cost of high-quality early education. She looks at the trade-offs that policymakers must make between different types of early childhood investments, as well as between quality and quantity for any given early childhood investment. Definitely worth a read:

When the National Collegiate Athletic Association announced its penalties for poor athlete academic performance this week, it let many high-profile Division I college basketball and football teams off the hook.

After four years of collecting data, the organization was set to enact full scholarship penalties for teams that fail to keep their athletes on track to graduate. But because of the NCAA's generous use of waivers for wealthy, high-profile athletic programs, as well as a flawed penalty structure, many teams with poor academic records found themselves in the clear.

Under the NCAA's Academic Progress Rates (APR) system, teams get points each semester for retaining athletes and for keeping them academically eligible. The NCAA has a system of penalties for teams that post low APRs. For the past three years, most teams have not been subject to the penalties, however, because of squad-size adjustments, or exemptions due to insufficient data.

Many low-income parents with children in low-performing schools are not taking advantage of free tutoring available to them under No Child Left Behind.

Colleges' reliance on adjuncts, or low-paid part-time instructors, to carry much of the teaching load at their institutions has long been one of higher education's dirty little secrets. College lobbyists are fighting to keep it that way, as they are opposing efforts by Congress to shine a little light on their adjunct hiring policies.

Pope Benedict XVI's first visit to the United States is spurring supporters of Catholic schools and the media to highlight the decline of and obstacles facing Catholic schools.