Title IX was adopted by the United States Congress in 1972. The United States Department of Labor (U.S.A. DOL) website states that Title IX makes discrimination due to sex illegal in the entire country. In 1972, when the law was inducted, Title IX was needed for women’s athletics in college to grow, but is it still needed?
All post-secondary schools are required to have the same amount of sports that are available for both men and women, and National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) DI and DII athletic programs are required to have the same amount of scholarship money divided up between the sexes evenly. (U.S.A. DOL).
With the increase in popularity of college football, the number of scholarships that football teams at major universities use has also increased. Varsityedge.com states that, “There are 6.9 million high school athletes, how will you stand out. There are 254,000 seniors who play high school football. There are only 5,042 athletic scholarships awarded at the D-I level. Your odds are 50-1 that you get a scholarship.” Because of the sheer number of football scholarships that are dished out each year for each team that there is no single sport from the woman’s athletic side that competes with football in the number of athletes involved, so sports like women’s rowing can give full-ride scholarships to nearly every athlete while sports like men’s lacrosse or men’s ice hockey are only allowed to give out a handful per school, making it much harder for male athletes, in sports other than football, to have the same opportunity to get a college education.
Mike Ricordati of 97.1 TheFan in Columbus, OH has said on his midday radio show, Common Man and the Torg, that, “There are 100 players on Ohio State’s football roster, 80 or so of them are on scholarship.” With 80 athletes alone on scholarship from one team, the rest of the men’s athletic department have to “spread the wealth” around as evenly as they can between the rest of the teams. Where as women’s athletics can spread more scholarships more evenly throughout all of their sports teams.
I’m not saying that Title IX should be taken out, but what I am saying is that there should be more consideration into changing the law. I personally believe that scholarships should be divided up according to the percentage of the total revenue that the sport brings in. With football being the main money maker at the vast majority of college and universities in America, they deserve the most amount of scholarships. As each sport earns less of a percentage of the total revenue, they will get less scholarships to do hand out until they start to make more money.
The proposed model above is based on a simple capitalism policy that this countriy's economic system is based on. The people who bring the most amount of money into a company get paid the most by said company. Instead of paying the athletes a wage to go to school and play sports, you give them a free or cheaper college education. The NCAA gives athletes meal stipends because they don’t have time to work, compete, and still focus on school. In an article by the Bleacher Report, they say that the Big Ten Conference is going to give their football athletes $2,000 - $5,000 a month. That is anywhere between $24,000 and $60,000 a year to play football at a Big Ten school on top of the scholarship that they may have been given..
Another proposed idea is to exclude football from the allocation of scholarships that are given by universities. That schools have all of the same benefits that Title IX requires now: equal training facilities, equal opportunity to coaching, equal equipment, and all other accommodations must be equal, but instead they exclude the football teams at every school from the allocation of scholarships. Although this would allow for men’s collegiate sports to allocate more scholarships to athletes, it would be saying that college football is bigger than the law of the United States of America.
Regardless of what change is made, if any, you can be certain that women’s college athletics have benefited greatly because of Title IX. In Marcus Brophy’s 1998 US News & World Report article, “Paying for Tuition”, Brophy states that “Of the 248 teams added by colleges during 1996-97 school year, 227 were for females”. This is a dramatic increase from the amount of collegiate athletic opportunities from women in the 1970s, when women’s university athletics was almost inconsequential..
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