The University of North Carolina, commonly referred to as UNC and regarded as one of the best basketball schools in the country, has just recently been caught with making their student-athletes take “paper classes” for the past eighteen years. What are these “paper classes?” These were classes that never met or provided deliberately easy material, yet were on record as real classes at UNC. All of the 3,100 students that took these classes received an A, almost all athletes, and most of those athletes were star players on the basketball team. One of the players, Rashad McCants, said that in 2005, he rarely went to classes and that his tutors wrote his term papers for him. He took four of these paper classes and was awarded A’s in each. This assistance boosted his GPA and made him eligible to play. UNC went on to win the NCAA championship that year, a win certainly tainted by the illegal academic aid that most of the players were receiving.

It is completely unfair to supply the student athletes with these unearned A’s in their classes. The only reason that UNC went to such lengths and risked heavy fines and athletic program suspensions was to allow the athletes to play for their school and make them money, by illegally boosting their GPAs. This is completely unethical because these athletes are playing for universities and not professional teams, so academics should come first.

All of the other students were not entitled to this same treatment. These other students would have to work extremely hard just to get the same grade that the student athletes were getting in their paper classes, because the university could not profit off the other students. Even though the athletes are considered more important by the university, that is no reason to allow them to slack off in the classroom.

By a school doing this to its players, it is placing the athletes’ futures at risk. What if sports careers don’t work out? The athletes will have nothing to fall back on, and will continuously regret not working in real classes for the rest of their lives. Only 1.2% of college basketball players ever make it to the NBA, so athletes generally do not make a career playing basketball. UNC’s actions completely disregard the well-being of its athletes and display that UNC only wanted to benefit from the athletes, not have the athletes benefit from a UNC education. In essence, UNC had these athletes play for them for four years only to kick them to the curb, leaving undrafted athletes to find a job with their substandard education.

Although it may not have been openly stated, UNC’s main goal, especially in this case, was to win a national championship. This was indisputably the goal for the athletes: to perform on the court, not in the classroom. This is, of course, hurting the student-athletes in the long run, but if it meant winning a national championship for UNC, they felt the risk was worth it. The more time the students spent mastering their sport than sharpening their academics meant there would be a better product on the court when the opening game of the season came. By adopting this mentality, UNC did win a basketball championship with practically the entire team enrolled in paper classes.

The way that UNC handled this situation is embarrassing. For them to even attempt to pull something off like this is disgraceful to their university, and all universities around the country. Every student should have the same opportunity to succeed at school, and UNC was corrupting this process. The foremost principle of a university is to provide higher education, which UNC completely ignored, in the pursuit of money. This dilemma was unfair to many people, including other students who did not receive these benefits and other teams who lost because they did not endorse paper classes.