Supporters of football must confront an essential fact: only about
10% of the student body attends an average football game (Almond 2002).
This is very low and is significant considering students are admitted for
free. There is simply no reason for a university to host a football
team if its students do not care about it and do not support it.
Many football supporters remember the glory days of the SJSU football
program, when sports played a central role in the life of the campus.
These are significant accomplishments worthy of honoring and
remembering. But this motivation for supporting football ignores the
fact that, simply put, SJSU today is not the campus that it was 20 or 30 years
ago. Our campus today is much
more diverse. Furthermore, our
student body is comprised of individuals who are almost inherently
uninterested in football.
In a notable essay, Burton Clark and Martin Trow offered
a typology of university students, dividing them into the 4 categories � the
collegiate, the academic, the vocational and the rebel (Clark and Trow 1966).
Intercollegiate football is of great interest to only one of these
types of student � the collegiate. �The
collegiate culture [is] a world of football, fraternities and sororities,
dates, drinking, and campus fun�.Teachers and courses and grades are in this
picture but somewhat dimly and in the background� (Clark & Trow 1966).
At many Division I-A universities, the collegiate culture
dominates, meaning high attendance at football games and other sporting
events. However, this is not the
case at SJSU.
Anybody familiar with SJSU will immediately recognize
that the majority of SJSU students fall into the category called
�vocational�. For vocational
students,
�there is simply not enough
time or money to support the extensive play of the collegiate culture.
To these students, many of them married, most of them working anywhere
from twenty to forty hours per week, college is largely off-the-job training,
an organization of courses and credits leading to a diploma and a better job
than they could otherwise command�.To many of these hard-driven students,
ideas and scholarship are as much a luxury and distraction as are sports and
fraternities.�
Demographic data regarding SJSU
students fit the classic definition of vocational student.
The average Spartan undergraduate is 24 years old (SJSU Statistical
Abstract), significantly older than the national average.
Approximately 70% of our students have jobs that require them to work at
least 20 hours a week. Many are
married and/or have children and relatives to attend to.
These are simply not the types of students who will spend 4 hours of
their precious free time to watch a football game. They have proven it year after year, as attendance statistics
at SJSU football games will attest.