Well the NCAA has finally admitted what everyone knew all along. College sports run at a deficit and are supported internal university funding.
Story is at http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/05/2839n.htm which reports the results of a NCAA based study. I think it is behind a subscription login so here are some choice bits.
“…just 17 of the more than 300 athletics programs in all of Division I—about 5 percent—earned a net profit between 2004 and 2006, with ticket sales and private donations accounting for more than half of all revenue.”
“…In contrast with previous NCAA information on the budgets of athletics departments, the new report distinguishes between “generated” revenue, earned directly by athletics activities, and “allocated” revenue, the direct or indirect support that universities give to sports programs.”
“In addition to the skyrocketing salaries for coaches, Mr. Diacon said, the latest trend is to build state-of-the-art facilities for sports that have no chance of recouping the costs of those structures.”
Sadly (although completely in character for the NCAA) the report only provides aggregate figures rather than the specific figures for individual universities. I’m a professor at University and Kentucky and this year the state has cut about 6 percent of our budget, tuition has gone up 10 percent and faculty and staff get no raises. While UK could possibly be one of the 17 programs that this report says turn a profit (I have my doubts about the methods, athletics departments have all kinds of good accounting tricks where by expenses that primarily benefit them get paid for from other sources) we have no way of knowing if this is the case.
Let me be clear, I’m not against sports per se, but it is way past time to bring them back to earth especially in time of financial hardship.
Well, I’ve always being curious about how the US college system supports and promotes sport within an academic environment. In Australia, sports are considered an extracurricular activity, unless you’re an outstanding runner/rower/swimmer, and then we ship you off to the AIS (Australian Institute of Sports0 where you can sprint and skiff and do the Aussie Crawl to your hearts content.
The tertiary education system here is devoted to academia and nothing else.
The funny thing is that the NCAA will somehow use this information to say, “See? We told you student-athletes weren’t profitable, so stop telling us to pay them,” and get everyone to forget that college sports are a money pit for the colleges and a goldmine for professional sports leagues.
OK - without paying to go read this article, I don’t think this says anything that surprises me, at least from reading the OP. I am hardly amazed that college sports programs as a whole are subsidized by the college. What would be interesting is to see how many college football programs make a profit, and how many Men’s basketball programs make a profit - or alternatively how much support they get from the college or how much support they give to other sports programs.
Of course, such figures are open to massive manipulation - if a training facility is built that is used overwhelmingly by the football program, but is sometimes used by other sports, where is that cost allocated?
In the 1925 silent film The Freshman the film’s fictional college is described as “a large football stadium with a college attached.” So it goes back at least that far.
Sports are the top concern at many of America’s big universities today. Don’t believe me? Compare the football coach’s salary to that of the university president at any given institution.
The University I work at (Minnesota) is in the process of building a $300 million football stadium for it’s losing program. They demolished around 1,000 parking places badly needed by students at this commuter-heavy school. They said there would be no net loss of parking spots as they would add new spots. The “new” spots they added are actually old spots at the State Fairgrounds (which are not even in Minneapolis.) They recommend you drive there and then bus to the Minneapolis campus. Any doubt where the priorities lie? Players themselves don’t have to do this, of course, as they get preferential housing considerations and most of them zoom about campus on mopeds. The players are also treated to swanky hotels rooms before games. And I’m talking HOME games here. Yes, the U pays for hotels for the players on days before home games are played so they don’t have to stay in the dorms the U also is paying for. Why? Because everyone does it so we have to do it too to be competitive.
Our school has been disgraced by literally hundreds of athletics scandals. There has been massive academic fraud, players arrested for a breathtaking assortment of offenses, rock-bottom graduation rates, players accepting cash payments, athletics employees embezzling from the University and on and on, but nothing can shame the university into backing away from sports.
I always tell people I work for a minor league sports program that happens to have a university attached to it.
That’s just so depressing. At least you guys have Tubby Smith now, he’s a straight up guy (seemingly). That’s a lot better than Haskins was.
Sadder still is that this kind of treatment starts in high school, when these student atheletes are even more impressionable, and they grow up with the immature notion that they “deserve” preferential treatment because of “who they are”.
I’d imagine the accounting for college sports is incredibly Byzantine, amenable to manipulation in countless directions. For example, the excepts appear to simply compare ticket revenues with college sports funding. I suspect, however, that at least in some instances college athletics play a huge role in soliciting alumni contributions. And how about TV and playoff revenues, and possibly even marketing of licensed clothing and paraphrenalia?
I also question the conclusion that big time college sports cost colleges and create a boon for professional leagues. As someone said, Division football and hoops might well be the only programs that make a profit, or at least come close. This is despite the huge coaches’ salaries and pricey facilities. So should we eliminate all athletic programs that do not cover their costs? Might have to get rid of cross country, track, wrestling, golf, rowing, gymnastics, and many more, with women’s sports generally taking a bigger hit than men’s.
Don’t get me wrong, I think all sports - including college - are overblown, and would strongly support having college sports mre closely resemble club activities. But I would have to see a lot more to consider this report earthshaking.
I’m with you there. I like college athletics, and think it should be an integral part of the college (if the college so chooses). I don’t mind it “losing” money, any more than I mind the French department “losing” money.
I am mad at the bullshit NBA rule regarding one year in college (I know they don’t have to go to college for the year) as I think that utterly corrupts the process. I’m also sure some schools have got the balance wrong. I only have first hand experience of one US university, and they seemed to strike the balance pretty well between competing in sports, and not letting it dominate life.
I was on a student activity group in college, and we got to see and (theorhetically) make suggestions about the budget for student groups for the coming year. Every single year, athletic groups & teams got millions of dollars, and all the other student groups got maybe a hundred thousand or two. We were always told that it was just the way it was. And every year I was there the ‘special fee’ that was supposed to support student groups went up.
$0 is how much of our new football stadium is counted against the athletics budget. This counts as a capital expense and is budgeted accordingly.
That’s not to say the U doesn’t engage in laughable shenanigans to try to put a polish on the situation. For instance, the U has claimed that the football stadium is not just an athletic facility. The arts will also benefit from it since the marching band will be playing there. I’m not kidding, they actually made that claim. And the cost of the new plaza that will surround the football stadium is not counted as part of the price of the football stadium because it’s not attached. That makes the project look like it’s a little cheaper than it actually is.
Well, that’s actually true, isn’t it? I mean I understand marching bands are a pretty big thing at some schools - Ohio State for example springs to mind. Now you can argue about the degree of contribution to the arts program, but it certainly does contribute (assuming marching bands fall udner the arts program purview).
If a school were to build a big language lab, for example, and the business school used it as part of a program to promote a bi-lingual MBA, then wouldn’t that language lab be of benefit to the business school?
My first University job was with Georgia State University, which enrolls around 26,000. We had no football team. There was a movement among some Alumni, Students and employee’s to start one. Student Services calculated the cost and surveyed the student body to find out if they were willing to pay the additional fees. There is no football at GSU yet.
I like college athletics, and participated in collegiate bicycle racing, but universities would do better to spend their money on better services, facilities and faculty for their student body.
Here is an estimate of start up of GSU’s proposed team.
It is a subject I have thought about a lot. I went to the University of Michigan, which is one of the statistical outliers on the positive side. Football makes them a lot of money, and I think enough to make a tidy profit after all of the entire sports program is paid for.
And Michigan football culture is big, it even has a movie based around it. In the early 90’s they came up with a plan to base a huge Endowment increasing drive around that culture. I know that much of the endowment base came from people who didn’t give a crap about the football program, but my gut feeling is that without the football team comraderie it wouldn’t have gotten close. They went from a fairly small endowment in 1990, to one that is fricken huge by public school standards today.
In the case of UMich, football(and by extension sports) really has helped the entire school greatly, so I don’t want many changes, however I do realize that the vast majority of schools don’t have a similar situation.
It is hard to tell exactly from the report but based on what is said I think the TV revenues would fall into the generated category. The role of sports in alumni donations is often trotted out but (1) there is a lot of disagreement over causal link (i.e. would people donate anyway) and research on the topic is far from conclusive and (2) a lot of these donations go to the sports programs (i.e., mandatory “donations” to the athletics dept in order to get choice seats) and so don’t help the university per se.
It is important because so often people blow off the concerns about how crazy university sports are by saying, “well, they pay for themselves”. This report shows that for the most part they don’t. Hopefully this will lead to discussions about how much money a university should be spending on athletics. In a very real sense money spent on new stadiums, etc. is money that is not going into classrooms or other educational activities. It is very very zero sum and this report lays it out in black and white.
Div 1 sports keep the college name in front of the alumni and other potential contributors. I’m surprised Bronto Boy, who claims to be a professor isn’t capable of recognizing this intangible link.
Many here are trying to paint college administrators as overzealous sport fans. I think that a more probable explanation is that these same administrators fund their college sports programs for the same reason that other businesses use sponsorships to keep their name in front of the public.
But the crazy thing is that the French department* is likely running a profit. Take the amount of tuition dollars generated by French classes, subtract the departmental budget for French, subtract a reasonable amount for facilities and you end up with a surplus.
OK, I don’t know specifically for the U of Kentucky French department but I do know that the College of Arts and Sciences generates about $20 million more in revenue than it costs. Admittedly this back of the envelop math does not include all the costs of the College of A&S, $20 million is a huge margin so the College of A&S of U.K. is running at a profit. Talked about f**ked up!
Then you need to include the tuition dollars the athletics brings in. I chose law school between two final options based, in part at least, on a desire to see SEC football on a weekly basis rather than Ivy League football.
I recognize it (see above) but there are big problems with measuring how much and who benefits from it. This chestnut gets trotted out everytime this topic comes up and while undeniably an issue does negate the fact that real and measurable dollars are being spent on athletics vs. education.