Today’s (October 23) Time magazine and New Yorker carried articles dealing with a report of academic scandal of the University of North Carolina under the respective headline, “North Carolina releases Wainstein report on academic scandal - Time” and “U.N.C. boosters outraged that some athletes took real classes - New Yorker.”
Time says:
The report mentions that athletes' academic counselors directed them to take the classes in question. - -It details how a lack of oversight allowed Department of African and Afro-American Studies administrator Deborah Crowder and former chairman Julius Nyang’oro to create so-called “paper classes.” In these classes, students received high grades with “little regard” for the quality of their work. http://time.com/3533013/north-carolina-releases-wainstein-report-on-academic-scandal/
New Yorker says:
An organization of University of North Carolina athletic boosters expressed shock and outrage today over a report that a few members of U.N.C. sports teams may have taken real classes, despite the widespread availability of fake ones. http://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/u-n-c-boosters-outraged-athletes-took-real-classes?intcid=mod-most-popular
I was interested in the unique contrast of the words, “Real Class” and “Paper Class.” The latter is shown in quotation mark.
I can’t find “paper class” in dictionaries at hand. However Google Ngram shows the emergence of the word, “paper class” early in 1860, and its usage peaked in 1970.
Are the words, “Real Class” and “Paper Class” college sport specific? Are they applicable to other beneficiaries such as the children of plutocrats and dignitaries? How popular are they as the antithesis?