College Athletics — especially football — is a major money maker for colleges and universities. In fact, profits are so high that the schools should start paying their players! After all, why is it okay for the institution to profit financially from their athletes’ hard work while the athletes are poor college students? And these profits are used to help the school finance other academic and student life programs -- so the whole institution benefits, but they don't?
We’ve all heard this argument and some of us believe in this argument. But it could not be further from reality. Before drawing conclusions, let’s look at the facts.
There are 1,000 institutions affiliated with the NCAA. Of these, only seven athletic departments turned a profit in 2015. This means that more than 99 percent of all the colleges and universities in NCAA Divisions 1, 2 and 3 had to directly or indirectly subsidize their athletic department – and this doesn’t include athletic departments that are affiliated with the NAIA. Just to be clear, when I say “subsidize,” I mean the institution uses funds collected from tuition, fees, state funds (tax revenue) and charitable contributions to cover its costs. Ultimately, however, students bear the overwhelming majority of the burden.
Most students understand that the school uses a chunk of their tuition to pay for athletics, but what’s shocking and not commonly understood is how much. In 2011, Ohio University spent $22,841,117 in athletics and earned about $3,000,000, which means the institution subsidized $19,576,760 of that. Where did they get all that money? Well, the largest student fee at nearly every institution is the Athletics fee, and at Ohio University, it’s $48 per credit hour — which turns into $5,760 over four years — only it goes up every year so that figure is likely a best-case scenario. Shocking? It shouldn’t be. Even though this is just one example, it’s actually a rather common one. To name just a few more examples from 2014-2015:
- James Madison spent $44 million, earned about $9 million and subsidized $35 million.
- University of Houston spent $45 million, earned $19 million and subsidized $26 million
- Georgia State spent $28 million, earned about $6 million and subsidized $22 million.
- Georgia Southern spent $20 million, earned about $7 million and subsidized over $13 million.
So we have massive, irresponsible spending by our institutions of higher education, and it’s not even on the education of the students who pay to attend – it’s on athletics. In fact, the growing disparity between education and athletic spending is quite sobering. For starters, The Knight Commission reported in 2014 that Division 1 FBS schools spent an average of $110,964 per athlete ($155,220 per football player) and $16,615 per non-athlete – that’s seven times more! If that isn’t enough, we’re seeing a national trend of schools cutting academic programs while expanding their athletics programs – and the students are the ones who pay.
If you read my first piece or attended college within the last 10 years, you have a picture of how serious our student debt issues are today. Tuition prices have quadrupled in the last 35 years while athletic spending has nearly doubled in the last 10. In 2013, David Sayler, Athletic Director of The University of Miami said, “At some point, we’re going to hit a wall where we have to think about how we’re spending those dollars. It’s certainly cause for concern.”
If this spending is so dangerous, then why do institutions continue to increase spending on athletics?
The answer is a complicated one, and I will address it next week.
