I think the bigger issue is the lack of scholarships for non-athletic activities. There are many other things that colleges and universities could give scholarships for that would foster a more diverse and inclusive student body, but the preferential treatment given to athletes actually impedes that through diversion of funds.

I was rather happy when my alma mater decided to use a pile of alumni association money to build a massive LAN center and start pro e-sports teams instead of starting a football program. The e-sports program will give scholarships not just for the gamers, but also for theater kids that become shoutcaster personalities, and they use the LAN center as a way to beta test the games coming out of the game development programs. They really emphasize the educational aspect of it as well and push the gamers to get involved in game design or creative writing majors/minors so that their scholarship activity can actually benefit their career after school. It does help that the school is down the road from Acti-Blizz, so internships are plentiful.

There are other ways for the schools to support potentially profitable student activities that don’t exclude people unable to participate in sports.

Mayo, Stanford, University of Michigan and University of Minnesota all turn out more research than Harvard does, and those are just the tip of the iceberg. Harvard is a big name, but they aren’t making the big breakthroughs anymore.

Also the ivy league medical schools don’t provide as much in the way of community medical services as the others do. To my knowledge, Harvard isn’t out there running critical access hospitals in rural communities at a loss like Mayo and University of Minnesota are.

(And I’m absolutely positive that there are a bunch of other state universities and medical programs that do just as much as Mayo and University of Minnesota in terms of community medical services, but I’m just not as familiar with them )

It completely excludes a lot of people with physical disabilities or health problems though. I promise you that the kid with a chronic health condition that has them in and out of the hospital while they’re getting through school is a harder worker than the captain of the football team that’s just maintaining their GPA to stay on the team.

Edit: Also, it’s sexist as hell. The best scholarships are for men’s sports and many women’s sports don’t get anywhere near the same support as men’s sports, even in equivalent ones like soccer and basketball. There’s no women’s football league, and the women’s leagues for other sports are abysmally supported.

That’s the idea.

The PE bullshit is why I want to be a physician in the public, county ER that actually employs its physicians directly. Also, the PE companies don’t qualify for PSLF, and they don’t pay enough to make up that difference against non-profit hospitals.

That’s part of my point. My American education was pretty limited on the internal politics and civics of other countries, but my husband who went to high school in a different state did get a decent amount of information about how modern/current European countries are structured. So I guess it’s safe to assume that other countries will also have differences across regions.

The differences in curricula across states mean that some states would have gotten the correct information while others may not have. I know the science and history classes in my state were pretty different from some other states.

In my experience, the people who vote Republican/conservative/Trump do so out of a certain amount of philosophical and emotional laziness and denial. Confronting the roots of our societal problems is difficult and uncomfortable, and takes a degree of empathy and emotional intelligence that many people simply do not have. To be clear; it is rarely their fault and frequently a result of the external influences and education during their formative years.

The conservative viewpoint that has functionally become hereditary and contagious is that you are special and good, and the only people that are also special and good must have the same values, prejudices, advantages, and deficiencies that you do. This is why if you are nice and polite to conservatives they start spouting more and more bigoted bullshit. It’s because, in their mind, the only good people are the ones that agree with them, and they perceive you as “good” for extending basic decency to them.

This cognitive shortcut is how I have succeeded in planting a lot of seeds of progressive values in the minds of my classmates at the conservative, religious school I accidentally ended up in. Each one of them is a single starfish, so to speak, but each individual moves the needle a little bit. Small progress is better than no progress.

I think having something that gets vetted by experts would be better, but this might be a good starting point.

For America, you’ll also need to have a drop-down for states. I graduated from high school in California in 2009, and I’m currently working on a medical degree, so I’d be delighted to contribute to this. I’d especially like to help with a sex ed section for Americans.