The University of Colorado faces charges it used sex, alcohol and drugs to recruit high school players. Colorado is just the latest in a seemingly unending list of educational institutions embroiled in recent sports scandals, spurring widespread demands for reform. A growing number of critics argue college sports actually harms higher education and exploits athletes. Only 54 percent of Division I-A football players and 44 percent of the basketball players ever graduate; rates are lowest for minority players. The critics blame the win-at-all-costs ethic in many big-time athletics programs and the millions of dollars at stake. Meanwhile, the vast majority of schools have to subsidize their intercollegiate athletics programs. And some educators worry that the problems of big-time college programs are drifting into less-prominent sports and smaller schools.

Tom Price is a Washington-based freelance journalist who writes regularly for CQ Researcher. Previously he was a correspondent in the Cox Newspapers Washington Bureau and chief politics writer for the Dayton Daily News and The Journal Herald. His most recent book, written with former congressman and ambassador Tony Hall, is Changing The Face of Hunger: One Man's Story of How Liberals, Conservatives, Democrats, Republicans, and People of Faith Are Joining Forces to Help the Hungry, the Poor, and the Oppressed. He is the author of two Washington guidebooks, Washington, D.C., for Dummies, and the Irreverent Guide to Washington, D.C. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Time, Rolling Stone and other periodicals. He earned a bachelor of science in journalism at Ohio University.