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Most kids, and parents, think of college as the place you go to get a "higher education." It didn't turn out that way for at least 3,100 students at the University of North Carolina.

CNN reporter Sara Ganim has been reporting the story out of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, that university staff and athletic coaches encouraged student athletes to take "fake classes" in order to get fake grades that would allow them to keep playing sports and spend their extra time practicing instead of studying.

University staff saw so-called paper classes and the artificially inflated grades they handed out "as key to helping some student-athletes remain eligible," a former prosecutor wrote in an independent report documenting 18 years of such cheating. CNN reports at least four UNC employees have been fired and five have been disciplined in the scandal.

"As an athlete, we weren't really there for an education," Rashad McCants, the second-leading scorer on the championship University of North Carolina basketball team 10 years ago, told CNN's Carol Costello. "You get a scholarship to the university to play basketball," he said. In other words, the point wasn't for him to actually learn. That's just sad.

"The university makes money off us athletes," McCants told Costello, "and they give us this fake education as a distraction." When McCants first made these remarks, university representatives tried to shoot the messenger, attacking him and his credibility. Now, an official report suggests that not only was McCants telling the truth but that at least 3,100 other students share his story.

And I think it's safe to assume that while the degree of inventing classes from thin air in order to pass athletes may have reached extreme levels of immorality, if not criminality, at UNC, thousands and thousands of other student athletes have been robbed of a quality education at universities all across America because their bodies are treated as far more important than their minds.