Was looking at some of the player bios when I noticed a pattern - Amy LePeilbet, Lauren Cheney, Megan Rapinoe, and Lori Lindsey all sociology majors.
Saw several other players were psych or education, but at first glance seems like a lot of sociology majors!
Posted Jun 29, 2011, 6:36 PM UTC
This whole "sociology is easy" is bogus. There are required courses in statistics and research methods (which, granted, many look forward to about as much as dental surgery) - something many other majors do not require. Art history and communications don't have math or research methods requirements, but we don't pile on them, right?
And, to be fair to the players, a number of them were also advertising, education, or psychology majors.
To be honest, some of the most underwhelming students I have ever met were MBA students. No kidding.
And believe me - it's not just athletes avoiding the hard sciences. It's all kinds of students. Multi-hour labs and a course sequencing that makes graduating in four years nearly impossible turns off a lot of would-be scientists.
I have also noticed a growing trend of instituting applications to individual programs and colleges, most often in the business and education programs, that effectively shuts out some of the weaker students who end up in the social sciences and humanities.
But regardless, in my experience female athletes tended to be among the best students. Painting all student athletes with the same brush is not just unfair but misleading and inaccurate.
Art history and communications don't have math or research methods requirements, but we don't pile on them, right?
Of course not, even though they're athletes they can always fall back on their degree in....
I always laugh when I listen to sports commentary. Just the other day the commentators said something along the lines of "You know, along with great athleticism, these guys are really smart too. So-and-so is majoring in sociology, blah blah is majoring in poly-sci etc". Sociology is probably the easiest major to pass, which is why athletes pick it. They can focus on their athletics more than classes.
This applies to pretty much any athletic team, though.
it also applies to any large enough sample of college graduates. but yes, a lot of athletes (especially at schools with top sports programs) see sociology as the "easy" major. probably a little disappointing to most of us, though maybe they're on to something.
an ESS paper session from this past year dealt with research of student athletes (the researcher largely tutored student athletes). i believe it involved a bit of interviewing and some hard data on GPAs, retention and graduation rates, and so forth.
he claimed that a sizable portion of the students he tutored read at no better than an 8th grade level but were allowed to scrape by and graduate anyway. tons were sociology majors--because, they said, "it's easy." and while i don't mean to take anything away from these women, who've done themselves well, is it all that surprising that some athletes would choose sociology over, say, chemistry or mechanical engineering?