 Let me welcome everybody, welcome to the Future Trends Forum. I am so glad to see you here today. We are covering such an important topic with a great pair of guests and I'm really looking forward to our conversation. Now I have to begin with an apology. My apology is that we've had, as I said, eight years of this program and we haven't really yet touched on college sports. I mean, it's come up a few times at different occasions, but we've never had a full session just on it. We've actually had a full session on eSports, which shows you my own bias, I'm much more comfortable in the digital realm than I am in the college sports realm. So I wanted to get past that and I wanted to do that by taking it seriously and what a great way to take things seriously is our two guests, Kirsten Hextram and Tyler Ransom are both faculty who have great backgrounds, very different backgrounds in college sports, economics, development and admissions. So without any further ado, I'm going to start bringing them up on stage so that we can begin our conversation. And hello, Professor Hextram. Hello, thank you for having me. Oh, my pleasure. Good to see you. Good to see you. Where are you today? Is this your office? This is my home office. Ah, it's sharp. It's very sharp. Thank you. Thank you. And where is home? You're in Oregon, right? Yes. I'm now at Oregon State University, but prior to that was at Oklahoma with Tyler. That's right. Even though you didn't connect, you still had that coincidental space. Yes, exactly. Well, I'm so glad you could join us and especially because of your background being a very successful athlete on top of being a faculty member, which is amazing. But in order to introduce you to people, I mentioned to you this before, we introduced ourselves by talking about what we're doing next. So I'm curious, what's coming up for you in the next year? What projects, what research, what topics are up for most in your mind? Yeah, so what we'll probably be getting into is my book, Special Admissions, that focused on access to college via sport. But I just completed a five-year follow-up study to that. So my participants that I had interviewed during their college, I'm now interested in essentially how they use their athletic abilities to transition into the labor market and in what ways is privilege kind of reproduced and codified in those transactions. And then I'm also doing a study with a colleague at MIT where we're interviewing athletic admissions officers across the country and across institutional type, too. I think something we'll get into to understand the ways in which they're defining and assessing athletic talent in their admissions processes. Oh, excellent. That sounds like very, very important work. We need to see that. Seriously, Kirsten, when you can, when the next step is, please come back so we can host you to share your newest research. Oh, thank you. We'll do. Okay. Well, hang on a second because I need to bring on stage your collaborator, your co-conspirator, and your former Oklahoma, and let's bring up Tyler Ransom. Let's see if we've got him here. Hello, sir. Welcome. Thank you. Welcome aboard. Where have we found you today, Tyler? I'm sitting in my office on the campus of the University of Oklahoma. Excellent. Excellent. And being an economist, you have to have a whiteboard. I understand that. That's exactly right. Normally it's full, but I erased it for today. I'm sure you may just turn around and start filling it up as we go. So you know the drill now. What are you working on for the next year? What lies ahead for you? So right now, you know, I kind of have a similar vein as Kirsten where I'm wanting to focus on understanding why different universities offer different sports programs in the first place. So you see in the data, you know, the Ivy League and the Nescaq and other elite conferences, they actually enroll more athletes at their school than like the Big Ten schools do or the SEC schools. And so even though the enrollment at these elite places is much, much smaller, sometimes an order of magnitude smaller, they're filling up their seats with even more athletes than at the bigger schools. And so trying to understand that process is an ongoing piece of research for me. Wow. How are you looking to publish that in some scholar of the articles or perhaps a new book? That's right. Well, so I haven't written a book yet. Sometime I hope to, but this will be a journal article. So I'm currently working on that with a grad student. Well, please let us know when that comes out because it would be really important to see that. And welcome. In fact, welcome both of you. Let me just quickly rearrange things so that we can see both of you very sharply. I'm going to ask a couple of quick questions just to get the ball rolling, give you both a chance to talk about your research and your work. But then everyone in the audience, it's going to be over to you. So I'd love to hear your questions. I know some of you have come with preexisting comments and thoughts, but also as Professor Hextrom and as Professor Ransom speak, think about what you'd like to ask them more about everything from a clarification to a disagreement to sharing evidence that they are completely correct to asking them to talk about other aspects of higher education and athletics. I guess the first question I wanted to ask is admissions is a topic of a great deal of concern right now ever since, of course, last summer's Supreme Court decision about Harvard and considering race and admissions. I'm curious if you could speak a bit right now about the role of athletics in admissions overall. I mean, Tyler, you mentioned some of the elite universities which are just recruiting huge amounts of students, much more than state universities. What else should everybody know about the role of athletics in admissions? Yeah, I mean, I think the number one thing is to just know that athletes are treated almost completely differently in the admissions process, particularly if they're at a higher skill level than the rest of their teammates. And that has knock-on effects for, you know, who are they crowding out? I mean, especially at these elite schools where there's a fixed capacity, you know, Harvard hasn't expanded its class size in 100 years. And so there are some trade-offs to be made, and so that's something to keep in mind. Okay, so that's almost a parallel admissions process. Yeah, and well, I'm mindful that Tyler's going to have to leave early, but I know my contributions are similar to Tyler. But Tyler, do you want to also share what your research found about kind of who the typical athlete is that's getting those preferences, particularly at elite universities? Yeah, no, I think that's a good thing. I forgot to mention that. So, you know, you can just look at the sports that are offered at a place like Harvard or Yale. You know, they have four separate rowing teams. They have women's ice hockey. They have a lot of them have women's wrestling as well as men's wrestling. And so, you know, the types of athletes that are participating in rowing that can be competitive for rowing or that can be competitive for women's ice hockey are people who come from much more well-off socioeconomic backgrounds. And so, you know, that's actually part of what my ongoing research project is trying to understand is that there must be something about the background of these students that sort of acts as an affirmative action for the rich in the way that these are operating in the admissions process. And so, trying to understand how that fits into the university's objectives to make their educational offering more accessible. And so, that's kind of where things are going next. Well, thank you for that answer and Professor Hextrum, thank you for pointing out. We have appropriately, we can think of Professor Ansem is on the clock. He's going to have to leave a bit early. So we want to squeeze what we can out of him before he has to go. And I often hear that people describe college sports as actually regular affirmative action that they often give people who are either very poor or racially marginalized a better chance at a college education. Is that also happening but at different schools or is that just incorrect? I mean, I think it is to an extent, you know, particularly in certain sports, the athletes are disproportionately coming from black or Hispanic backgrounds. But I think for most of the sports, sort of the add on sports that are beyond the basic package, I think those are disproportionately white upper middle class or upper class backgrounds. Yeah, one way to think about it again, if we like zoom way out is of the kind of public and media attention focuses on a handful of schools and a handful of sports. So this is really when we think of the word college sports, probably in our mind, we're imagining football and basketball. So we're imagining a men's sport and probably the most commercialized sports. And in those areas, in those areas, we have seen a concentration of black men as well as people from other minoritized communities. And so they become, they take on our imagination of who we imagine as a college athlete. And there's a whole set of really complex forces that have led to that racial concentration. But that's less than 3% of all college athletes. So again, when we zoom way out, there's 1100 institutions that are part of the NCAA. And the NCAA is not even the totality of college sports that we have in this country. We also have the NAIA as a governance league and we also have community colleges. So there's a really wide array of athletics happening across our institutions. And I think when you start to zoom out and start to look at those numbers, that's where, again, Tyler's data comes in. Some of my more qualitative data comes in where you really see a concentration of white and upper middle class people that are playing those sports. And I'll turn it back to Tyler in one second, but maybe when he leaves, I'm happy to talk about why that is, which these are kind of these trickle up effects were happening of the inequalities that existed in our youth and high school sports areas. Thank you. Thank you. I don't know if you've seen the chat is very interesting. People are sharing their own experience of sports, of swimming, of rugby, of soccer, and lacrosse. So you have resonance with the audience in terms of life practice and life skills. 1,100 schools are part of NCAA. I mean, that's more than a quarter of the entire aspect of higher education. That's way, way, way beyond the Big Ten and everything else. Well, I'm curious. We have questions that came in from people who couldn't make it here today. And one of them comes from Laney Millar. And Laney asks, what portion of student athletes are reliant on athletic scholarships to access college? So just to kind of give you a sense, scholarships are not allowed to be given to Division III schools. Sorry, Division III schools are not allowed to give scholarships to their athletes. And also the Ivy League is not allowed to give scholarships to its athletes. And so primarily, if we're talking about scholarships, that's going to be Division I and Division II, which if I remember correctly is about, I think it's roughly one-third, one-third, one-third for breaking up those 1,100 schools into each division. And so that's, you know, there's a lot of that. But then even on any single team, you're going to have walk-on athletes that don't have scholarship funds that are paying their own way and also making time to participate in practice and competition. So, you know, I would say probably, and Kirsten can correct me if I'm wrong, but I would say roughly, I don't know, 30 to 40 percent of all NCAA athletes, well, probably less than that, probably like a quarter, are receiving scholarship funding. Well, and just to add one more complication that I know that the sports of Oceanados will know here is, so again, these regulations are being set by governing bodies and they're usually a threshold, meaning if a university is allowed to have, you know, 20 scholarships, it doesn't mean they fund those 20 scholarships for that sport. It just means they can't go over that. So this is where you'll see a lot of discrepancies across the NCAA, just because there's that maximum level doesn't mean you can afford it. And then there's also two very big, different categories, especially in Division I, in terms of how we're thinking about what scholarships are. And so there are sports that require, if you offer a scholarship, it has to be the full scholarship. And so that has football, men's basketball, and then often women's basketball and women's volleyball. And then all the other sports, they're allowed to break up or parcel those scholarships. So if they're allowed to have 10 full scholarships, they could fund 10 athletes if they have that money, or they could break it up into $1,000 per athlete and then fund 60 if they wanted to do it that way. So I see that because, again, double in the details here, there's a lot of ways in which that narrative will emerge. It'll say, we need to keep sports because it's offering all this financial aid for low-income students. Well, again, that might not be the case. If we're saying a scholarship is only $1,000, that's not going to be the full tuition for a student. Similarly, we're saying that same narrative, but a full scholarship is going to an affluent person. Like, is that really showing that this is a social mobility maneuver? Oh, that's fascinating. That's very, very complex. And I'm afraid we have to expand on that because we have another question which will emphasize the complexity. This is a question from Joe Spagna who asks, what are the fundamental differences between the Division I schools of revenue sports and the vast majority non-scholarship Division II and III and NAIA for whom sports provide, essentially, no revenue? I mean, you're asking what the difference is. Like, so I would just say the difference is that people are interested in following the Powerhouse Division I sports and they're not as interested in following the other ones. You know, I'm not checking the score of the Northern Colorado game unless I'm an alumni or someone in that local community. So that's a big part of it and that's what drives the whole business enterprise. Well, thank you. Well, please go ahead, Kirsten. Oh, yeah, yeah. So I would agree with Tyler. I think, you know, again, we increasingly use the phrase big time universities or you might have heard the term Power Five Conferences, maybe now Power Four with the demise of the Pac-12, which I'm a part of. You know, again, what that's referring to is the schools and then the conferences that have been associated with the most high profile athletic teams that are able to get the most viewers that often win the conference championships that negotiate the biggest television deals. The historians, though, in the group, I think what's really interesting about this is those schools haven't always been the same over time. So it originated with the Ivy League. So these were the big football powerhouses. So the history of football really getting kicked off today. Football, as we know, it really started at Yale. I mean, this is where the highly commercialized practices began. So it is kind of a shifting target if you take a wider historical lens there. But in general, that that is the way to think about it. And one thing maybe to we can talk about later, though, what is complicated, though, is there might be differences in the scale, the scope, the money, the financing, but something the NCAA has been pretty good about is creating kind of one size fits all rules that apply to the athletes. And so there is a lot of similarity in terms of when we say something like what is amateurism, you know, that definition is getting applied to athletes that are in widely different contexts. And that's what's, I think, creating a lot of that complexity, though. So while, again, from the outside, we could we could mark these really stark differences across the divisions or across, you know, sport types. We're kind of in a interesting time where we've done these unilateral rules that have kind of trapped people in conditions that have made it really hard to have these nimble, tailored athletic programs that could be responding to the given context or needs of an institution. Well, sorry, we've all the cats of the house have been swarming me ever since they've been around. It may be that they've been hidden sports fans all along, I didn't know it. One, so first of all, thank you both for those great answers, Kirsten and Tyler. I do want to flag that in the, in our audience is a previous forum guest, the wonderful James Shulman, who is the author, among other things, a co-author of one of the great books on college sports called The Game of Life. I just put a link to the press page there. Tyler, we have another question aimed directly at you, and this is coming from the excellent Billy Prichard, and he asks this, how has NIL played a role, if at all, at elite institutions like the Ivy schools? Presumably, if the student athletes are from upper class and playing sports that don't generate revenue, not as much as NIL matters at a place like LSU? Definitely. I would say NIL is going to be proportional to whatever the following of the school or the athlete was before NIL. And so mainly you're going to see the star football, the star basketball players be the ones that are benefiting the most from NIL because they have the it factor that is attracting people to follow them in the first place. NIL stands for? Name, image and likeness. So this is in relation to a Supreme Court ruling from the summer of 2021 that basically said that the NCAA cannot prohibit athletes from receiving compensation for licensing their name, image or likeness. So basically, this opened up like commercialization. So athletes who are college students can endorse. They can come up with some endorsement deal that gets them money. And there was a really good New York Times article in the last six months that talked about the sort of Wild West of the lack of regulation around this, where the big time schools are setting up these charities that are not directly affiliated with the university but are funded by the boosters of the athletic department, and then hiring the athletes as employees of the charity or the nonprofit to do charity work. And then that's how the players are effectively getting paid. So it's not like they're employees of the university, but they are getting paid because they are affiliated with the university and performing on the field or the court for the university. So the future of the regulation of this NIL is really an objective great interest to a lot of people. And it'll be interesting to see what happens. In the chat, Billy followed up by saying, I think this is what LSU is doing here in Baton Rouge. Yeah, no, I think it's pretty standard. You know, my institution OU has a foundation that is basically paying all all OU athletes some amount of money. So the good thing about NIL is that the money that the stars are bringing in can be spread around to the the so called Olympic sport athletes, or the non revenue generating sport athletes. But that's kind of up to the school and how they want to set things up. Well, thank you. This is great. Kirsten, did you want to weigh in? Yeah, I guess to zoom back out again, just being mindful of folks who might not know these intricacies. So one real important distinction that the college sports is trying to make right now around name, image and likeness is we're still trying to maintain something called amateurism, or that athletes cannot receive direct pay for play. And so when Tyler was mentioning the collectives or charities that universities have done, this is because in the wake of changes to name, image and likeness, we've still tried to maintain this distinction that says universities cannot directly pay an athlete, or an NIL. So if you're doing an endorsement deal, they can also not directly just give someone money, the athlete has to go out and do some kind of service that again is outside of the university in some way. And again, why why all that matters or that might sound really fuzzy and it certainly is, is you're trying to preserve that the people that are participating in college sports are again, non professional amateurs. And if the universities were paying them directly, then that would potentially compromise the whole longstanding mission ethos legal apparatus that has supported the NCA and much of college sports. That's a difficult needle to thread. Thank you. Thank you. I really appreciate that that expansion of this. Thank you, Kristen. I'm gonna need to step out Brian, but I did want to just mention one last thing. There's a blog called Economist Writing Every Day. That's the name of the blog. And I think it was two or three days ago. The author was Mike Mikowski. He's a professor at Clemson. But he basically forecasted sort of what's going to happen with the pay for play issue moving forward because in the last couple days, Dartmouth was the Dartmouth basketball players successfully began the process of forming a union. And so that's kind of seen as sort of the the vanguard of this change based on what Kirsten just described. So if anyone's interested in sort of seeing what the economic ramifications of that would be, I definitely recommend that blog post. Tyler, are you are you actively following the chat box right now? I have it open, but I it's hard for me to focus on two things at once. The reason I ask is because Western just put in a link to exactly that post, and then Lee Scalera was set before you started talking about this, asked, what does it mean that Dartmouth basketball players unionized? There's a there's a brainwave being shared here at work. We don't want to make you late for your class, Professor Ransom. Thank you. Thank you for coming. Yeah, anyone who wants to follow up with me privately afterwards, you know, feel free to send me an email. You can find my website very readily. And can you can you share with me your your YouTube channel that you're working on? So it's not published yet. It will eventually be titled structural econ guy, which is kind of a play on words with some of the advanced econometric methods that I'll be doing on the channel and also promoting some professional advice that I believe is applicable to all academics, not even just economists. Well, excellent. We always love extremely nerdy puns and good luck. Good luck with the video and good luck with your class. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. And well, Professor Hexterm, we're, it's all on you right now. And we have questions coming in. Did you want to say something more before we get out? Absolutely. So I'll I'll kind of give a I can give a little more context on what I was talking about about amateurism. And then that might lead into answering the questions about Dartmouth and NIL and whatnot. So again, for the, especially maybe for international folks that might be in the house, again, the big distinction that the United States has tried to say is that we have this elite commercialized athletic model within our higher ed system in which the players are amateur. And this has evolved over time, but really again, starting in the Ivy Leagues, they kind of embraced this definition right from the beginning that athletes should play for the love of the game, not for profit. Again, just another plug for my book, I kind of give the history of that. And you see how, you know, right from the get go, there's a real elitism built into that. It was a way of preventing working class folks from getting access to sports in the way that the definition is kind of unfolded. You know, fast forward to the 1950s, there ends up being kind of this rebellion within college sports teams and athletic directors who really felt that there should be a way to compensate athletes. This was a way that they would better recruit them to their campuses. This was also because basically, you know, all the big schools were just violating this rule and finding ways to pay athletes compensate them through campus jobs, what have you. And so in the 1950s, we get, you know, what ends up being a grant in aid. So that's what we call it. We actually don't call it a scholarship. It's called a grant in aid system. But essentially, it sets up this contract between the university and the athlete, and it, you know, spells out if you do this for us, you will receive these benefits of sorts. Again, this is going to be really important because this is what is taken up in a lot of these legal cases. So when this originally happens, though, it does beg this question of, are they amateur if they're getting compensation? And especially, are you amateur if you have a contract, a legal contract with the university? And, you know, there's kind of this long and winding legal history that happens in the second half of the 20th century. As we see college sports getting even more commercialized. So as I mentioned before, commercialism has been there from the beginning. There's been ways in which universities saw that potential of charging admission, drawing people to their university, you know, through their athletic games. It started with rowing, which was the first collegiate sport and then, you know, got transferred into football. So universities have always seen a way in which they could profit, expand their institutional branding, you know, through these sport contexts. But we really see an explosion of that with tech technological innovation. So the fact that you then layer on, you know, corporate companies like television broadcasting as a way to give even more money to universities to them broadcasts, indicate their games. You know, this starts to really ramp up, you know, and accelerate the possible money that is circulating within college sports. So as this so throughout this long legal history, what what ends up happening is we have the US legal system has given the NCA an antitrust exemption. So what that essentially means is that they can act like a monopoly and set this unilateral rules on the athlete. So it's it's a either you agree to our rules or you aren't allowed in. So we have a pretty harsh contracts that again that that are connected to eligibility. So whether or not you're on a scholarship, anyone who participate in college sports, D3 all the way, you know, to D1, you have to have your eligibility certified by the NCA. And most of that certification is based upon your amateurism. You have to agree to all these rules in order to play. You aren't allowed to negotiate that. You can't say I like this rule. I like that rule. You have to agree to all their rules. And so that that's where the kind of antitrust stuff happens. What's also though tricky is our legal system, though, basically has this bifurcated opinion. It says the NCA, you can act like a monopoly and really restrict what people have said is stripped athletes of their fundamental human and legal rights. So up and until, you know, 2021, for instance, these universities owned an athlete's name, image and likeness. You could not post a YouTube video just talking about something without getting your university's permission. I mean, these were harsh, harsh rules around around, you know, your own sense of personhood, among a whole myriad of other ways in which, you know, athletes have been uniformly kind of stripped of rights that you don't see happening to other equivalent student bodies or similar, you know, worker populations. So as we've allowed the NCA to develop kind of more and more and more onerous regulations on what the athlete can do, the legal system, when the NCA stepped in and tried to say, well, let's, let's try to pull back some of this commercialism and maybe let's try to put limits on, say, what coaches salaries could be. The courts struck that down and said, no, no, no, you don't get an antitrust exemption. There has to be a free market in which universities operate and which coaches operate. So again, what's happened is this really bifurcated system, money, I mean, this is, what some economists estimate is the number two sports industry in the world, like, so we're second, basically to soccer or football, what everyone else calls football. I mean, this is a global behemoth of money that is circulating within our college sports system, but that the NCA is kind of constricted what the athletes get in that those billions and billions and billions of dollars, but everyone else's salaries have gone up and up and up, spending's gone up and up and up. And again, what I'm talking about really kind of relates to about 65 schools, you know, see earlier comments on the organizational complexity. So amateurism is really at the is the core legal apparatus for all of this because it's it's again, restricted not only what an athlete can get compensated, but it's also again prohibited their ability to collectively challenge the rules, the eligibility process. They don't have rights to do process to again, say, I don't think that enforcement should, you know, is fair or I don't think that these practice hours are fair. There aren't these ways that you can push back on your working conditions. So again, kind of we have this long, long Lila history of the courts athletes were challenging this. They brought workers compensation claims when they've been injured or families whose athletes have died playing football have brought wrongful death suits. There's been a lot of ways we try to challenge it, but the courts have been very deferential to the NCA under this guys that amateurism is a core American ideal. It's important to distinction and we should protect it. But you really have seen a shift in the past 10 years and it's it's an exciting time because again, you don't always see a legal system that has gone in one direction and been pretty conservative in one direction kind of swinging the other way, especially for employee rights at a time when this legal system actually isn't as favorable to employees. And so we have seen you know, both through Supreme Court actions, but also at the state level. So when Tyler was mentioning that NIL case that's you know, happening within our federal courts, well, that action really started with the state of California that stepped up and passed their own state level law saying, you know, we believe athletes have a right to this and anyone in the state of California will have to offer these these rights to athletes. So this brings us all the way up to what's going on with employment. So maybe two two ways or one way to think about this, there's lots of ways you would compensate people. So we were just talking about name, image and likeness. So that's just giving an athlete the right to in certain limited settings, say I can go be in a commercial or I could go sign autographs and get paid for it or I could go do a coaching clinic somewhere else and get paid for it. A lot of those activities have been prohibited. Now those are opening up. And so there's there's going to continue to be legal action in that space. Because we, as I mentioned before, there's still a lot of unclarity about how much athletes can participate. What do universities, you know, how involved can universities be? So for instance, how all the policies have emerged over time, it's given universities actually the primary say and what the NIL looks like. So if you're at, say, a Nike University and your university is sponsored by Nike, they have a non clock, the Ditas and you as an athlete want to go sign the Ditas, the university can stop that. And so there's still a lot of ways the university has power in that space. The other big open question, and this is getting cited in the Johnson case that's happening for anyone who might have heard that name is if we're now seeing athletes have a right to their name image and likeness, what is television? Like, what are, you know, these athletes were mentioned in March Madness and these games you're watching like, that is an athlete's name image and likeness, you're watching them on television. And so there's cases now being brought to say athletes deserve a portion of that television revenue. And as of now, there's they don't they don't have access to it and they don't don't have a legal right to it. So now they're trying to challenge it that way. And then the other way we can think about compensation is employee status. So is there a right for you just get paid an hourly wage for the activities that you're doing for the university. And that was what was really taken up in the Dartmouth case, but this wasn't the first time this happened. So folks might have remembered that there was a National Labor Relations Board case brought with Northwestern University. So the football players there in 2013 tried to unionize. And again, that's where the National Labor Relations Board is essentially looking at is what you're doing right now, similar to what an employee's work looks like, and they have all these tests that they look at. And a big portion of what they're looking at is what level of control does the employer have over the participant. Both in the NL or B case that happened at Northwestern and this most reason along with Dartmouth, you know, they were pretty convinced and they said, even if Dartmouth basketball isn't making a lot of revenue for you, that doesn't necessarily matter. You exert tremendous power over these athletes who control their sleep. You control their class schedules. And that level of they're kind of questioning, you know, what does that compensation look like? We don't know, but we really want to look at why is it that universities have really amassed that level of power and restriction over what I'm able to do. I'll pause now. I realize that was quite a long overview. Well, this is fantastic. I mean, I envy your students because you were so clear and you're so passionate and you were able to just elegantly summarize so much information. This subject is just more and more complex. I admire how much you were able to get your arms around. We have we have questions coming in from all directions. I want to make sure that people get a chance. And there's one from someone who I think is near you, George Pernsteiner, who asks this question, as efforts advance to classify student athletes as employees of their colleges universities, will the institutions all sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, I managed to accidentally cut that off when I bring it back up. Will the institutions all have to begin to pay the student athletes, even those in D3 in the new. So great question. I guess now is the time I should say I am not an attorney. So that's a don't take this as legal advice. But yeah, so no one knows the answer to this. I will also say that of all the legal people that I'm trying to talk to and find out an answer. There's no clear answer. So if someone tells you there's a clear answer, there isn't one yet. But I think this is what I was trying to get at earlier of the NCA is kind of boxed itself in because they've been so tied to what amateurism means and enforcing it again, like I said, unilaterally across those divisions. So they've really held the line to say that a D3 swimmer is the same as that LSU football player. Like that has held the organization together this whole time. And I think, you know, again, finally, both the public and the legal system is like they're way too different. Like we have to have a different way of understanding that one way I'll get us to think about it, though. So one of my areas of expertise is title nine. And I know title nine is often brought up as you can't pay it. Well, because of title nine, we can't do it. This is this is an often stated line you hear from administrators. But this there is a growing consensus that, again, if we were to say, make Dartmouth men's basketball players employees, that actually might remove them from the educational activity of the university because now they're on the employment side and title nine at its heart is saying you can not gender discriminate in educational activities. Now, there's other employment law that then is going to come into play. If you were to then segment, you know, men's basketball out and look at that as an employment part of the university, a marketing like we actually called it what it is and said, you now work for the marketing team, there's a marketing effort is branding our university, then title nine wouldn't apply. And if you were to keep sports as this educational activity and truly treat it as an educational activity, then title nine could be in that area and you could still have, you know, professional athletes in one area. The other option and you're seeing a lot of rumblings of this is, you know, you really could see a complete fracturing of college sports, meaning there might be the big time universities might create their own conference, move out, come up with a way in which they want to compensate athletes in some capacity, create a new model, and then we might keep what would be the D2 D3 lower D1 schools that would say, okay, we're going to try to return to amatrism in some sense. And that could be one way you could see a certain classification of athletes getting paid and others not getting paid. Wow. Wow. Okay, this is this is this is terrific. I'm so glad so glad you could join us. There's just so much. Before I say anything, Christian, there are the the chat box is full of people throwing in comms. I just want to share a couple of these. There's a lot of discussion about amatrism and is it all this money. Alex crew pointed out that the college football playoff, the governing body that oversees the FBS championship agreed to a $7.8 billion contract to broadcast the games 3232, which is a huge, huge amount of money. There are also notes about high school. Tom Haynes and Billy Pritchard, who teach in high school, say that they're seeing this already appear. Tom Haynes says my kids were essentially sidelined from sports at their schools because they weren't contributing to winning enough and really added as a high school teacher, he has high school athletes who are starting to get deals now before they even sign with the college and university, which is which is just well then and Lee scholar of the set as she's heard from some athletes. It's as simple as getting free food at a local restaurant and agreeing to post on their socials about it. This is this is astonishing, but I want to I want to get some of the serious questions. We have one from a great truckman at California State University, and he has a question, which is a little complex. If someone asked you how much money is attributable to college sports, what would you say? And and this is referring in part to to income. So I pressed him on this a little bit. And this has to do with how much money flows into colleges and universities from all sources, but that now includes money paid directly to athletes as well. Well, I wish Tyler was here could be more confident as the economist. But so the most recent number I've seen is 19 billion a year annually is the college sport industry valuation. And that, by the way, that number, that's just looking at television contracts, ticket sales, licensing, apparel. 19 billion is sort of again, the number that gets floated around. I think where he's getting at, though, to what university leaders say, though, is there's kind of these unquantifiable revenues that happen or associated with college sports. So it might be that, you know, on a given football game day, you'll see a spike in, you know, people buying that school's t shirts or you might see a spike in applications after a successful football season. And that that is also revenue for the university since people have to pay to apply. So that number I don't know. And I know is a much more moving target. The other point, though, that I want to, again, cannot emphasize enough is this is where it's really important to know the difference between net versus gross waste in college sports. So when we talk about it as a $19 billion revenue or industry, that doesn't mean that's in profit. That is just how much money is circulating that, you know, many of these universities are spending the money as fast as it's coming in. And they're also going into deficit spending. And there is a this is a whole other you could do a whole series on why that is, why sports are allowed to deficit spend in a way that academic departments can't just hemorrhage money in these sportsfaces. So I don't want to end up getting into other people's time. But that's like maybe one of the best ways to start to think about the sports financing. Wow. Wow. Wow. Thank you. Thank you. We have another question. I'm just bringing the questions in while we still have time and I'll make sure that you get a chance to take a whack at them. Professor Riaz Tejani asks, what are the ethics of making college athletic coaches the highest paid public servants in many states? It's unethical. Next question. That relates to that arms race thing I was talking about earlier or just this way in which what's happened is we've allowed this really competitive marketplace to develop around coaches salaries that we don't have around athlete salaries. So essentially because we aren't competitive about paying athletes what they're worth, a lot of that money gets attributed to coaches. So coaches can claim they're the reason why teams are winning and they're kind of gets an inflated salary. But the other point to that again, I wish the economists was here. But the other thing I've heard a lot about is part of the problem to is that there's no there's essentially endless funds, particularly from a public university to pay these coaches salaries. So like I said, they can go into deficit and they can basically say we'll carry that over to the next year and we'll push it down the line or tax taxpayers will eventually be on the hook for it. And again, there hasn't been the same accountability system because there's always this forever belief that well, if athletics are the big moneymaker, then we don't want to touch that and we'll have to keep paying kind of these future costs to try to keep chasing that potential future revenue. And it's just like I say, it's unethical and that we aren't holding this. We aren't using the same standard to other departments or other parts of the university that we have for athletics. Just thank you. Thank you. That's that's a great answer. And realize that was a great, great question. I mentioned James Shulman's coauthored book, The Game of Life. And one of the findings of that book is the kind of separated out nature of college athletics, having all kinds of separate separate streams and and ideas. We have more questions coming in and and this is one from John Hollenbeck, our friend who is probably buried alive in snow in in Madison. And he he addresses your upcoming work, I think. How much should future potential earnings play here? A football player has more potential upside than a member of the wrestling team. I'm not sure I understand that question, John, but does that question make sense, Kirsten? So is that would that be that if they were an employee for the university or that means like once they're out of college and they're trying to play professional sports? Good question, John, if you just want to follow up with that, either either on chat or here, I'll put up the open podium. Oh, he says once out of college. Oh, yeah. Well, again, open question. So this is I will say the NCA has really failed to do a lot of research and data collection on what athletes end up doing after college. We don't have good tracking and info, and that's part of what I'm trying to do in my next book. But one thing things we do know is that the vast, vast majority of athletes go on to pro sports careers. So some of the highest numbers you'll see is maybe one to two percent within football and basketball at the big time schools. So so wall call our higher ed system does act as a feeder to our professional sports teams and our Olympic sport teams and our national teams like much have to play in college to go on to those subsequent levels. But it's this pyramid of winnowing mechanisms. So the pool is getting smaller and smaller and smaller kind of as as you go to the top. But this does relate to another ethical question of like, should universities be acting that way? You know, every other country using the different model, which the national teams, you know, they pay for the player development and recruitment, you know, from the youth all the way up to the national level. But we have kind of privatized that system by saying that should now happen in, you know, private clubs, private communities and or in our education systems and putting the costs there. And I just flipped up your tube, you know, in case it wasn't clear. But you start going down the road with athletics. You can also make a lot of these arguments with the arts. And, you know, anybody who performs for the for the university and brings money in for the university, you know, it's not maybe not quite coherent. But it's just funny where to stop. Because, you know, what I would try to get out of my question is, there are courts that are a lot of the sport sport that will always be that way. Yeah. Whereas if you go to Wisconsin and you're the best running back, you have a good chance of making millions of dollars. And I'm just wondering if that differentiates. Yeah, well, so I think one thing that, you know, continues to be the difference even as today is if you're a musician at a university, you can go get paid to be a musician outside of the university. So you can go do a paid gig playing music. You could go play in an alumni's house and get paid three hundred dollars for doing it. That's all legal. And they have the right to do that. There isn't a national organization of musicians that systematically denied student musicians access their compensation, their name image and likeness, abilities to sue in court. But we've done that to athletes. And so I think that until we get into a universe where we can actually say that there is an apples to apples comparison between what an athlete can do with their talents and a musician, it ends up being that ends up being tough. But I also see the point of like what what's difficult is what we're having is we're having like a few very exceptional cases are kind of driving this organizational decision making. So the fact that you might have, you know, a highly lucrative running back at one university is then going to set the policy for all those eleven hundred schools. Like I think that needs to be something we need to grapple with more is really thinking about like we might need to have different rules, regulations, compensation models that can be tailored to the individual, you know, institution type school, what have you rather than again having these pretty uniform rules that end up with that one size fits all approach. Yeah, OK. So I mean, it's really illustrates, though, that we're getting to the tension points of having two separate institutions that education is somehow separate from employment and carry these arguments out throughout the curriculum of many schools. Well, and I'll say so here's another big distinction. And again, if I if I had to come down on something, what I would say one of the other big harms that we've done is I think in the if you gave the colleges the benefit of the doubt, what they said is they said, we're going to pass these pretty onerous academic rules to ensure amateurism. So all athletes have to be full time students. They're really heavy academic load at most institutions. Again, something that doesn't happen to the student musician. And and that has to be taken into account, because now what might happen is we're going to have really three classifications of a student. They have to be a full time student. They have to be a full time athlete. And then there have to be an employee. What counts as the employee in those three different roles? And what might the demand? How might those demands change even more if you become an employee? And so I am I think in all of these discussions, one of the things it's going to have to give is we cannot have such onerous academic requirements on the athletes. And I think they came from a good place. But this is where we've just seen a lot of abuse to try to keep athletes on these like really rigorous full time academic schedules that then end up creating kind of false majors or these really inauthentic experiences that if we were to just recognize like, hey, with those athletic demands, it might be better if you're a part time student or just taking one class or, you know, shifting your academic obligations around might lead to better overall engagement and a better overall experience. But the NC has clung so hard to this notion of amateurism and amateurism meaning full time student non-professional. That's why we haven't seen any of those rules really budge. Yeah. I mean, just real I know it's almost over. But the treatment that athletes got it when I thought of James Madison University, the private tutoring available the coach for the academics that that to me was just over the top as far as, you know, what their opportunities were compared to everyone else. So having a combination of academic requirements with academic resources. Exactly. Maybe yeah. Full time. You can take more of Alice. It's great after. Thank you. Good to see you, John. Thank you. Friends, we're almost out of time and I want to take the moderators privilege of asking one enormous question that it's impossible to answer in a hurry. But I just want to just give you a shot at this. What are some of the things that we should be looking for for the future of college sports over the next five years? Should we be looking more for how NIL plays out? Should we be looking at some of the changes in the conference identities and sizes? What else should we be looking for? Yeah, well, I will answer. I want to first validate all the folks in the chat that are asking about the youth sports. Again, that's a huge area of my research. I think it's super important and all your questions are spot on. I think and I do think it links to the future of college sports is we have the professionalization that's happened at our college level has trickled down into the youth level. And so we are seeing NIL happening at that level. We're seeing scarcity, meaning fewer and fewer spots on teams, all of that is lead leading to tremendous consequences for our youth. And then but I would say you don't even have to think five years out. I think in the next year is just going to be a blockbuster year for college sports. There are at least 20 different cases that are all taking a different slice of athlete compensation. So folks are interested in NIL again, as Alex mentioned, there there is a direct case that's going to be answering that question of if athletes have a right to NIL and television contracts. That's going to be huge. There's a case that's looking at who is the athlete employer if they became an employee. So would it be the university? Would it be the conference? That's a really big and interesting question. We're looking at whether they're going to unionize as to what extent they might become unions. And then as I mentioned before, I think all of this is going to raise questions around some of our civil rights laws around Title IX. Of what extent are we going to be thinking about gender equity in sports if we really change what an athlete is and what kind of their athletic compensation may look like. Yeah, yeah. That's fantastic. And you did that under the wire. And I'm so conscious of all these athletic metaphors I'm using today under the wire kicking off. Kirsten, you've been magnificent. You've been just one of our best guests ever. Thank you so much for being with us. What's the best way to keep up with you and your work? Yeah, so email. I don't use any social media. So just email me. And I can put that in the chat right now at Oregon State. Or you can if you Google my name, I'm sure you'll find my institutional page and just reaching out to me there. But yeah, I would love to connect and happy to come back and take on a more specific slice of the future of college sports. Oh, great. Well, we love that very much. And and we want very seriously when you're when this next book is ready, we'll be happy to help promote it and learn more about it. Oh, thank you. I appreciate that. Well, thank you so much and have a good early afternoon for you on the West Coast. Yes, thank you. And thank you everyone for coming and engaging. Well, thank you. Thank you all. But don't leave yet, friends. We just let me thank you all for the for all the stories you shared and for all the great questions you asked. I think this has been just a fantastic session. If you want to keep talking about these issues, please, you know, here's all my addresses on the socials, on Twitter, Master Don Threads, Blue Sky and my blog. Use the hashtag FTTE or just at me if you want me to to join up. If you want to look into our past sessions, including op topics that we've talked about everything from labor and student life, just go to our archive at tinyurl.com slash FTF archive. If I look ahead to our sessions, we're covering educational technology, education, abundance, neoliberalism and reform, Department of Education and still more. Just go to the forum, the future of education, that US page. Thank you again for a terrific session. I hope everybody here is safe and well. I hope you're doing good work and that the the turn of the year in the Northern Hemisphere towards spring is going to come with a lot of good times for you all. So no pleasure thinking and talking with you all. We'll see you next time online. Bye bye.