Don't play a zero-sum game

Are you interested in a high stakes internship?

This internship involves 20 hours of direct work a week, and a lot more on your own time. You get to work from your school during the week, but over the weekends you may have to travel as many as 13,450 miles in one semester.

If you get a job offer, you could go on to get paid millions of dollars per year. Keep in mind, your chances of getting an offer are very slim, and if you get the offer, you don’t get to choose what company you work for.

There is also a very good chance you can sustain serious short-term and long-term injuries at work. If you get injured, your chances of getting a job offer plummet.

One of the perks of this internship is the scholarship. You might get a full-ride or a partial scholarship to go to the school where you work. In turn, you’re expected to keep your grades up, even if your grades in high school weren’t good enough for you to get into that school in the first place.

Other than your scholarship, the internship is pretty much unpaid. Your school will make millions of dollars from the work that you do, but be careful: If you accept money for your autograph, you could lose your internship.

But this internship could make you famous. Tens of thousands of people will come to watch you work, and millions more will watch on TV.

If you mess up, you might turn on the TV and see people talking about what you should have done differently. But if you do well, little kids and people who you have never met will wear the uniform that you wear to work. Because they love you.

This internship is playing for an NCAA football team. Do you want it?

Like internships, college athletics should be a supplement to a student’s education. I take it for granted that one of the goals of education is excellence of character, and Aristotle writes in his Nichomachean Ethics, “Excellence of character comes into being as a consequence of habit.”

The rigor of playing a sport habituates an athlete to dedication, decisiveness and teamwork in a way that the classroom doesn’t. And yet, if I were to write that one of the defining characteristics of NCAA athletics was excellence of character, I would sound naive. Our community is no stranger to athletic scandals.

Like unpaid internships, college athletics have become less about the student’s learning process and more about the student fulfilling a service for his or her employer. The result is a system that is unsustainable and inequitable.

When profit rather than education is the institutional goal, participants at every level will act accordingly. What’s worse, it’s most often the students who are punished for doing so.

Our system of college athletics is broken. But rather than trying to get rid of it, we should try to rehabilitate it. This “internship” needs to make more sense.

Athletics and academics shouldn’t be in competition with each other. They’re both important aspects of a student’s education.