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Training
For The Olympics Is Hard Enough. Try Doing That While Earning A Degree
Elissa Nadworny & Jon Marcus
January 4, 2018
Max Aaron may have been the 2011 men's junior figure-skating champion,
2013 U.S. national champion and 2015 Skate America champion. And sure,
he's a top contender for a spot on the U.S. team in next month's Winter
Olympic Games in PyeongChang, South Korea.
But all his grandfather wants to know is when he's going to machan a
leibedik—Yiddish for "make a living."
Before he can do that, though, Aaron and many other elite athletes face
a big hurdle: Finding time, between all that training — hours in the
gym or pool or on the ice — to earn a college degree.
Aaron, who is 25, has been working on it — for years — balancing his
grueling training schedule with classes in finance at the University of
Colorado Colorado Springs.
A onetime hockey player who switched to figure skating after breaking
his back in high school, Aaron took his competitive nature with him to
the university, where he was determined to outdo his classmates.
This story was reported for radio by Elissa Nadworny and for the web by
Jon Marcus of the Hechinger Report.
"I look at, they got a 99 — I'm going to get 100," he says during a
break from the rink in the World Arena Ice Hall, where aspiring and
elite Olympic skaters train.
That doesn't mean it was easy. Because of his skating career, he hadn't
ever taken the SAT or ACT, so he had to start at community college. He
worked as a a waiter on the weekends to help pay the tuition. To
accommodate his three hours a day at the rink, plus warmup time,
strength conditioning, physical therapy and dance, he typically took
his finance classes from 8 to 10:40 a.m. and 7:30 to 10:05 p.m.
"I laid out my entire schedule," he says. " 'And these are my breaks
and this is when the courses meet and where I can fit them in.' "
Universities "don't work around you," he says, "you work around them."
Meeting the needs of older students
Olympic athletes and hopefuls comprise only a tiny handful of the older
students trying to get higher educations. But their struggles with
finding the money and time to do it, among other problems, illustrate
the problems legions of adults are facing.
American higher education long ago stopped being primarily for the
18-year-old undergraduate, tossing a Frisbee on a manicured quadrangle.
Sixty percent of undergraduates today are over 25, working full time,
financially independent of their parents, or connected with the
military, according to the American Council on Education. That's nearly
16 million people.
As the number of 18-year-olds declines, colleges and, eventually,
employers, are becoming more dependent on this older group to fill
classrooms and jobs. And the supply of them is vast. One in five
American adults has earned some college credit, but never finished a
degree, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences reports.
Yet exactly at the time when more nontraditional-aged adults are needed
to go to college, institutional and government policies make that
harder than trying to skate uphill.
Compared with most of these older students, Olympic athletes and
hopefuls have some help. In August, Colorado made them eligible for
lower in-state tuition at community colleges and public universities;
56 athletes are already taking advantage of that. There are 500
athletes in residence at the U.S. Olympic Training Center, chosen by
the governing bodies of their sports.
In 2014, the U.S. Olympic Committee began offering college
scholarships, using money it receives from donors. And athletes can
take online courses for free from the for-profit DeVry University, a
USOC sponsor.
Thirty-seven student-athletes have graduated, and there are another 118
enrolled. (About 1,600 paying students at DeVry have filed claims for
loan forgiveness, saying the school defrauded or misled them, according
to the Century Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank, and its parent
company has reached a tentative deal to sell it.)
"The athletes are a little bit at the forefront of this," says Leslie
Klein, the USOC's director of athlete career and education. She's a
former two-time Olympian who competed in kayaking and canoeing. Veteran
athletes with multiple trips to the Olympics, she says, "are just
trying to chisel away at their educations [and] we're trying to make it
a little easier for them."
In many ways, it's still tough. The USOC last year awarded $236,000 in
tuition scholarships, for instance, but the amount requested was four
times that much. Only 80 athletes got them out of 120 who applied.
Then there are the time constraints. Olympic hopefuls train so
incessantly that their training is often the equivalent of a full-time
job. On top of that, they travel often to compete. And many older
athletes juggle families and jobs on top of all that.
Elana Meyers Taylor is a bobsledder with two Olympic medals: bronze in
Vancouver and silver in Sochi. It took her four years to get her
master's in sports administration, and then she started studying online
for an MBA.
Bobsled competitions are often held in tiny ski towns around the world,
which made studying hard in places without reliable wireless service.
"You can imagine getting an online degree is pretty difficult," she
says.
She'd work on her academics during travel time and at night. "I'd get a
couple of hours in and study here and there," Meyers Taylor says. She
got her MBA in finance in 2015.
"It's not easy," she says of combining work, study and international
competition. "I'm not going to say ... I wanted to sit down and read
about the stock market" after every race. "It's about setting a goal
and keeping that long-term perspective."
Jennifer Page, a 2020 Olympic hopeful in women's wrestling, just
finished an undergraduate degree in health sciences and strength and
conditioning at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs, or UCCS.
"I would wake up, I'd have class at 8 a.m., I had practice at 10. I'd
eat, shower, go back to school from 1 to around 3:30 and then have
practice again from 4 to 6 p.m. and I'd go home and eat, shower, do
homework and go to bed. And that was my day."
Page earned some credits at Oklahoma City University, where she spent a
year on a wrestling scholarship but quit to train for London with the
Olympic team. It took her six years to earn her bachelor's degree.
Page was amused to hear her younger classmates complain about how hard
college was.
"I think how easy it would be if all I had to do was go to school," she
says. "Life seems so simple when all you have to do is show up for
school and do your homework."
Figure skater Mirai Nagasu also hopes to return to the Olympics — she
came in fourth in Vancouver in 2010, when she was just 16.
"Whenever I have a break, I'm back on my computer and studying," says
Nagasu, now 24. She's in the equivalent of her junior year, on her way
to a bachelor's degree in international business at UCCS. "It is so
beyond difficult to balance it all. During finals week I don't get a
lot of sleep and I tell myself, 'I can't do this anymore.'"
But she and other Olympic athletes do, because they know their
competitive years will someday end.
"An athlete ends up at the pinnacle of a career sometimes as early as
their late 20s and they've never known a life outside of sport," says
Leslie Klein, who interrupted her own education to compete before later
earning undergraduate and graduate degrees. "If they haven't gone to
school, they have nothing to lean on in terms of a career outside of
sport."
That's what keeps Max Aaron focused on fulfilling his grandfather's
wishes.
"I have met a lot of athletes who were on the top of their sport, and
then sat around and did nothing. They just didn't know what to do," he
says. "It eventually ends, and that's what I think a lot of athletes
forget. It's 10 years after the Olympics and you won the Olympics and
that's great, but no one cares."
His graduation ceremony last month was held in the arena next to the
rink where he trained. His grandfather couldn't make it, but his
parents did.
After he received his degree, he went back to the locker room, changed
clothes, and got back on the ice to train some more.
This story was produced with The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit,
independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in
education.
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