Editorial: The educational insanity of March Madness
“It’s the best three weeks in basketball, Pennsylvania,” Gov. Josh Shapiro tweeted.
It seems like just about everyone has caught the rabid athletic bug that sweeps across the country every year as winter turns to spring. Welcome to the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament.
The brackets come out with people weighing the pros and cons of this team versus that team, deciding who will win over who and whether they have what it takes to move from 64 teams to 32 and 16 and 8 and so on.
Shapiro has the rare opportunity to pick both Pitt and Penn State, even matching them up against each other. Go team!
March Madness turns on televisions and burns up headlines. It sells pizza and soda. It fills bars with enthusiastic fans living and dying with every score.
March Madness is a cleverly branded exercise that generates more than excitement. It will pull in more than $1 billion for the NCAA. Host cities will make millions more. WalletHub projects $10 billion will be made in online gambling — and that doesn’t necessarily count that bracket you filled out at work.
The schools get a chunk, carved up by the NCAA to various athletic conferences in a convoluted formula that reads like tax code.
It is not surprising that people know more about the scoring records and statistics of sports teams than they do the academics of the colleges in question. Basketball is definitely more exciting than sociology or comparative literature.
Still, it is sad that something as important and world-shaping as education cannot prompt more interest than a ball and a hoop.
Colleges need help. They need to find new ways to structure tuition. They need to stoke the fires of their economic engines. They need to boom the potential of their entrepreneurship programs at the same time they make it affordable and attractive to go to school for things like social work and nursing and plain old teaching.
These aren’t topics as simple as who beats Purdue or Baylor and whether Pitt and Penn State have a Sweet Sixteen clash. Higher education is complicated. It’s also important and increasingly controversial politically. It needs more attention with the same kind of analysis from the public that is devoted to three-point shots.
But that won’t happen, and it’s the most maddening thing about March.
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