Week 4 brought us into a class titled Student Populations & Experiences in Higher Education. I'm not naive enough to think that everyone entering any given college has had the same upbringing or background. I realize they haven't all been lucky enough to have a top notch high school education nor the family support or ability to help them through these developmental years. And yet the glaring inequities and the variance in the scale of what parents can and are willing to provide their children opens eyes and breaks hearts.
On the one end, you've got the parents we were introduced to when we looked at the book Game On by Tom Farrey. The parents in this book started training, coaching, teaching and pushing their kids almost from the day they were born. This attention and drive, or in my opinion over attention and pressure, on children at that young an age scares me. I look at that and all I can see is the future for these kids: over-specializing at an early age, burn-out, resentment, and lack of a real childhood. Parents pushing these children to be the best so young means these parents are determining their kids lives for them before they even have a say in it. They're raising athletes, not young boys and girls. When do the kids just get to be kids?
On the other end you've got the kids who are coming from nothing. They don't have the resources to have the top of the line equipment or facilities, and they're raised with the impression that professional sports or entertainment are the only ways they are going to have to "escape" their hometowns. These students focus so much on their athletics growing up that their academics are rarely up to par, and they are frequently admitted to schools through special-admits for their athletics not their academics which only perpetuates the problem, as these students continue to focus on their athletics in order to keep their scholarships rather than on their academics. Many times the schools are forced to accept these students, knowing they don't have the services to assist them academically, which robs the student of the complete experience.
This class made me really look at the sort of services provided to student-athletes at different universities and to establish a "best practices" proposal that I would like to see at any university I work at. It makes you think hard about the different services an institution needs, to be able to meet the academic, athletic, social, and personal needs of its athletes so that they may get the most out of their college experience. I also realized that it may be more of a challenge than I expected. You've got to merge the children of both of the above examples and make sure that you're providing the proper services and support to them to not only help them, but assuage their parents and get them to let go for a bit and finally just let the kids be kids.
Bring it on, Challenge. I'm ready.
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