Elon University poll director Jason Husser on the rapidly changing world of college athletics
Description
Pollster Jason Husser
Few areas of modern American popular culture have undergone greater or more rapid changes in recent years that college sports. Thanks to a series of successful legal challenges, the nation’s longstanding practice of treating college athletes as amateurs has been completely upended and, especially at big schools engaged high-profile sports like football and basketball, teams have become professionalized, with many athletes switching schools yearly, and raking in multi-million dollar deals under so-called “name image and likeness.”
In a time of such rapid change and upheaval, it comes as little surprise that many people who were used to how things once worked – be they university leaders or average citizens and sports fans — are experiencing a sense of disorientation and discomfort. And this fact was made clear in some recent opinion surveys conducted by the Elon University Poll and the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, and recently Newsline caught up with the Elon poll director, Prof. Jason Husser, to learn more.
In Part One of our recent extended conversation Husser, we discussed some of the results of the recent opinion surveys of university leaders he oversaw on the subject of the rapid changes that have been underway in college athletics – particularly the professionalization of once amateur sports and the newfound ability athletes enjoy to transfer from school-to-school.
In Part Two of our chat, we dug deeper into some of these issues, the concerns that many university leaders have about how these changes are impacting low revenue sports, and, in addition, how these views compare and contrast to what a poll conducted this past summer revealed about the attitudes of the general public.
Click here to listen to the full interview with Elon University Professor Jason Husser.
United States
