Registration season is fully upon the University of Oregon, leading some to wonder why certain members of the student population register before others.
Students that can register early include student athletes, in addition to team managers, Clark Honors College students, students with veteran’s benefits, some students with disabilities and students in the federal TRIO program. In such a heavily sports-centered school, student-athletes receive a lot of support for their academics, including mandatory tutoring sessions at the Jaqua Academic Center.
In a statement from the university, Angela Seydel said student athletes get priority registration because of National Collegiate Athletic Association academic eligibility requirements. These requirements include progress toward degree and grade point average requirements that may differ from the university’s.
“Priority registration allows them to balance academic schedules with required commitments for their teams,” Seydel said.
Both student-athletes and non-athletes have mixed opinions about this policy.
Lyric Davis is a freshman on the Acrobatics and Tumbling team.With her busy practice schedule, “it gets really overwhelming,” Davis said. Ensuring a class schedule that works for her eases some of her stress.
Another freshman student-athlete, Natalie Fukumoto, who plays on the indoor volleyball team, claimed she’s not sure the policies are justified. “A lot of the time we do have a reasonable advantage just because we have a lot of mandatory things we have to be at, but the rest of the school also has jobs and other extracurricular things they have to do too.”
Fukumoto said she doesn’t feel entitled for respect just because she’s an athlete.
“I think that everyone has a lot of things on their plate, and whether you’re an athlete or a non-athlete, you have to take care of things every single day, whether it’s big or small,” Fukumoto said.
Some non-athlete UO students think the policies are unfair. Havi Paulk, a third-year, had just come from an advising appointment and learned a class she must take is already full.
“I do feel like it’s unfair because I think every student should be regarded the same in terms of where they should be in line for registering,” Paulk said.
Other students, however, understood the reasoning. “There’s more scheduling issues for student athletes than other people have,” third-year Hannah Vuylsteke said.
Freshman Logan Arthur said he feels like it’s a justified privilege given what they give back to the community.
“They’re obviously contributing to our school in a pretty decent way: they’re playing our sports, they’re building culture for us,” Arthur said.
Registering for classes early isn’t the only benefit that UO student-athletes experience. In addition, they can request football tickets early and incoming freshmen athletes can skip IntroDUCKtion.
Skipping IntroDUCKtion, the two-day mandatory summer orientation all incoming freshmen attend, was especially a sore spot for one freshman, JT Myers.
“I didn’t really want to come to introDUCKtion since I had to pay so much money for it … (student athletes) getting to skip it doesn’t seem exactly fair,” Myers said.
Athletes still had to complete the seminars online or when they arrived to campus, like the required nationwide sexual violence module “Let’s Get Explicit.”
