I’m not sure if you are just having fun with some counter-examples, but if not, it’s worth pointing out that it’s possible football helps some instituations and not others.
Some get a degree - but by no means all. Here’s a link to an article on football graduation rates; at the bottom are some schools that don’t rate particularly well.
http://www.higheredinfo.org/dbrowser/index.php?level=nation&mode=graph&state=0&submeasure=27
The U.S. average graduation rate for all students is 56%. Football players aren’t all that different from the student body in general.
It’s great for Title IX programs, because I can’t think of a single female sport that is profitable. Division I college football programs make enough to cover the costs of those sports.
Women’s basketball at the top tier of programs (UConn, Tennessee, etc etc) is probably about it. Maybe the top couple of volleyball programs in California as well? Not sure. Either way it’s a very, very small number.
The essential difference being though that the primary function of school is for education, whether or not you consider Women Studies valuable you at least must conceed that it is education where Football is not.
I have seriously spent some time looking for any data on what public universities spend on athletics and I can find nothing. I don’t pretend to have super human Googlefu, but this is public money, don’t they have to abide by laws of full disclosure? It shouldn’t be hard to find this.
You could just as easily state that the primary purpose of college is to prepare you for a career. You can play football for a living or coach football for a living. Further, do things like theatre or music really have much more educational value than sports?
It’s all available on this site, but I haven’t had the time to dig into it.
At some places, the athletics department is run as an auxiliary unit. That means tuition dollars (and other revenues that make up the general fund, such as public dollars like the state appropriation) don’t flow to it. Athletics is entirely self-supporting and budgeted separately.
In a place like Michigan, revenue sports (of which football is the whopper) make enough money to pay for the program AND fund the non-revenue sports, which lately have been given the more flattering (if not entirely accurate) label of “Olympic” sports.
The other fact at Michigan (and places like it, I’d guess) are that athletics dollars flow to the academic side of the U, not the other way around. When a scholarship athlete enrolls at Michigan, many people assume that the U just forgives the tuition. Not so; the athletics department pays the student’s tuition to the U. That’s how money gets paid into the academic enterprise.
I’ve mentioned this before, but about 10-15 years ago Michigan decided their endowment was very low for their size.
They had a five year plan(or something) to get 1 billion in donations to the University. I’ve never seen any number breakdown, and it probably would be impossible anyway,but my gut feeling is that the vast majority of the billion was made by piggy-backing on “Michigan football culture pride”.* But to numerically assign an exact value to the university of the Football program in that case is impossible.
see The Big Chill
This is exactly what I was looking for, thanks.
And then Michigan opened its e-mail and found the solution to that very problem.
You dork, I was originally going to ask what you meant, then I got it. :smack:
And to think, I basically filter spam for a living.
It often isn’t direct, but it is noticable. My numbers may be a little off, but IIRC, following their run to the NCAA Football Championship in 2000, Virginia Tech received about 3x as many applicants for the following Fall with a significant boost in out of state applicants. Similarly, George Mason saw about twice as many applicants for Fall 2007 following their Final Four appearance.
Having good sports doesn’t make a school more presitigous, but attracting significantly more applications helps a lot. However, AFAICT, neither of these schools’ sports operated at a loss prior to that either.
To me (coming from the UK where college sports, outside of the Oxbridge are not a bit deal) I’ve always thought college sports was the biggest money making scheme in sport. You have a prestigious set of leagues which generate huge interest in the society as whole, not just on campus, and all the television revenue and attendance that goes with that , where the players AREN’T ALLOWED TO EARN MONEY! Zero, zip, bubkiss! That seems like a sweet deal to me, in the world of modern sport where superstar salaries are a team’s main expense.
I realize the some small college team in the boonies is not going to bring in as much as a perrenial final 16 contender, buts still.
Often times the top contenders are in the boonies. One reason why American college sports are so popular is that many state universities are located in college towns, far from major cities, and provide entertainment to areas that can’t sustain professional teams. The University of Nebraska football team, for example, is a perennial power and the biggest thing sports-wise for hundreds of miles in any direction.
But otherwise, I had the same reaction to the OP that you did. Why would anybody doubt that big-time college football is profitable? How profitable would the NFL be if they didn’t have to pay the players?
I can promise you that more people make a living playing music or as actors than play football professionally. I’d wager to guess that that is true by orders of magnitude.
Additionally, theater and music make you a more educated, better rounded person. I really just don’t think that’s true of football. Sure, playing any sport is good for your health (well, football also comes with a lot of injuries), teamwork, etc - but how many people actually play football at these places? Can we compare that to the number of students who participate in plays and musical ensembles?
If you say that there are more actors/performers than football players, you are probably right. If you say that there are more working actors/performers who were educated at major public universities getting work per year than all of athletics I would strongly doubt it. Very few actors begin their careers at a Division I school, but many athletes do. Also consider that actors work for a lifetime, athletes work for about 8 years if they are lucky. Of course, I would also wager that the combined salaries earned for athletes far outweigh that of actors/performers educated at DI schools too, so if you happen to measure a college’s worth by lifetime earnings athletics probably beats theater soundly.
This is such a monumentally ignorant statement it deserves to be pitted. Frankly I just don’t have the energy to do it.
You’re honestly going to argue with me that watching college football is as important in the grand scheme of things as a fine well rounded liberal arts education? Because, my dear, please pit away. Be sure to point out the excellent education received by the actual “student” athletes at most big football schools.