Almost a year ago, I wrote about Education and athletics and my belief that our society puts too high a premium on athletic achievement. A month later, I wrote about the effect of the economy on colleges and universities.

While the economy slowly begins to get better (according to various economists and television talking heads), unemployment remains high and colleges have raised tuition, cut classes, and downsized staff.

But only in education. College athletics, however, are doing just fine.

Recently, the University of Texas at Austin just decided to give their football coach a raise. A big raise.

We don’t need more reminders that college sports is a gigantic business, camouflaged with pompoms and the sound of cash registers drowned out by spiffy marching bands, but we continue to get them anyway. And today’s comes with the force of a frying pan.

Do pause and consider that Texas just gave its head football coach, Mack Brown, a raise to $5 million a year. The university carefully explains he is worth it because he is taking the Longhorns to the Bowl Championship series title game for the second time in five years, that the money will come out of athletic department revenues and is not crippling the budget of, say, the engineering school. But lost in that is the fact that under the pompoms is supposed to be a nonprofit educational institution, one that recently raised tuition and voted to freeze the pay of university presidents, but whose football coach is now envied by oil barons.

An editorial in the Austin-American Statesman outlines the defense for giving Brown that enormous raise.

The news that Mack Brown, head football coach at the University of Texas, will be paid $5 million this year and millions more if he chooses to stay is hot community conversation.

The juxtaposition of that stratospheric salary and layoffs of UT staff members fuels angst over the value placed on knowledge and skills.

Why should a football coach make more than a professor? Yeah, respond fans, would 40,000 people buy tickets to hear a lecture on the Medicis?

Pardon the expression, but the exercise is academic. In this world, football sells not only tickets but also an image that attracts donors. Face it — football generates dough.

Brown's seven-figure salary should be put in context of the many, many millions the UT football program makes as well as the recognition it brings the school.

See? The athletics bring in donor cash...which is funneled back to athletics and not so much to the downsized staff or to reverse the pay freezes and tuition raises. Besides...who wants to hear a lecture on the Medicis? Right?

OK. I guess that argument kinda sucks, actually.

But the University of Texas at Austin isn't the only guilty party. There are numerous universities that have put athletics far above education.

Pete Carroll, of Southern Cal, earns around $4.4 million and is one of three coaches with salaries that are worthy of the pregnancy ward.

And it’s students that take it on the chin.

USC has increased its tuition by 32 percent as well as cut classes, in addition to the $31-plus million in debt the athletic department simply looked away from in 2007 that has yet to be paid.

The University of California is paying Jeff Tedford $2.8 million in addition to another $430 million renovation project for its stadium, despite state appropriations and overall funding for education shrinking.

But Arizona is the worst of them all.

Arizona’s $378 million spending effort to upgrade sporting facilities in every major sport over the next 20 years is the most idiotic news I have heard from any state in this country to date—see what happens when education get’s cast aside?

This is from the same state who just recently claimed it was going broke.

Despite the announcement, and the exaggerated salary of Mike Stoops at $1.3 million, the state is one of 34 who have cut spending to public colleges and universities. Arizona State has cut almost 600 staff positions; can you guess where that touted $378 million is coming from now?

This past weekend, eight people were arrested for breaking windows and throwing burning torches at UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau's campus residence. The hostility stemmed from rising fees coupled with budget cutbacks. It was estimated there were upwards of 75 people involved.

This followed the arrest of 66 people from a four-day protest last week at Wheeler Hall. Earlier this year, on November 20th, the same building was the site of a student occupation.

Earlier this year, UC Berkeley gave their football coach, Jeff Tedford, a contract extension. Even before the extension, Tedford was one of the highest-compensated employees of UC Berkeley. The extension is incentive laden and could grant Tedford more than $4 million a year.

According to the contract, which is through 2013, "The maximum total potential payout under this contract occurs in year five in the amount of $4.285 million. Payment of this amount is dependent upon Mr. Tedford achieving all goals, including all those in the 'Accomplishments.' " The accomplishments include winning national championships and receiving national coach-of-the-year recognitions while keeping the team's cumulative GPA at 2.8 or better...

...Tedford's base salary would jump 34.3 percent, from $167,500 to no less than $225,000, and his "talent fee"' would get a rise from $1,332,500 to $1.575 million...

...Tedford will receive a $1 million bonus if he is Cal's coach through the 2008 season, another $1.5 million if he finishes 2011 and yet another $1 million for completing the contract. He also gets a $1 million signing bonus.

All these years I have been operating under the mistaken impression that colleges and universities were places of education. Not so much farm teams for the NFL.

When the argument for cutting staff and raising tuition while concurrently giving your football coach a raise boils down to "wins bring donors", there is something wrong with the way universities are being operated. What happens to that donor money? Do any of these universities hire back the hundreds they downsized? Do they refund tuition money to students?

Hell no. They refurbish their stadiums and give the coaches even bigger raises.

I enjoy watching football as much as the next guy and I don't begrudge college athletes for using their physical gifts to get into colleges and universities they might not be able to afford to attend. I do have a huge problem with the fact that those universities are too expensive for so many to afford to attend. Rather than athletic scholarships...how about making education accessible to all?

How about making education the priority and not athletics?

All this focus on athletics over education is taking a toll.

The United States is now in a rare club. We are one of only two nations where people ain the 25-34 age bracket have less education than their parents.

While the U.S. ranks second among all nations in the proportion of its population aged 35–64 with a college degree, it ranks tenth in the percentage of its population aged 25–34 who have earned an associate or baccalaureate degree. Other nations are overtaking the U.S. in educating younger members of their populations to meet global challenges and remain vitally engaged in the competitive terrain of the twenty-first century....

...We note the declining performance of U.S. tenth-graders in math and problem-solving abilities relative to their peers of other nations. There is a diminished interest in science among undergraduates in the U.S., and the U.S. is losing ground to other nations in the proportion of young people earning a college degree. While U.S. universities and colleges have for many years been the destination of choice for promising international students to earn undergraduate and graduate degrees, several nations are now heavily investing in their own higher education institutions and seeking to educate more of their own best and brightest at home. Finally, we note that the price of higher education continues to increase at rates that make a college degree financially challenging to many students across the United States.

When the cost of attaining a college degree is too financially challenging for American students, we will remain one of two countries where young people have less education than their parents. That is, of course, until the other country fixes the problem. Then it will just be us.

But by all means...let's continue to focus on how unfair the BSC system is as opposed to a playoff series. Hell, let's have government intervention! And as we focus on football, out future generations continue to become less and less able to compete in the global workforce due to lack of education.