Perhaps it sounds heretical, but how hard would it be to shift all the funding schools receive for sports into academics? Also, where exactly does the funding for sports at major Universities come from?
The same place funding for professional sports comes from--ticket sales, sponsorship, TV deals, etc. The reason a university pays the football coach more than the president is because the football coach can bring in more money. (So can the players, incidentally, but there are NCAA regulations--in other words, a cartel agreement--that you don't actually pay the players, aside from giving them a generous scholarship.)
At schools where sports are profitable, the profits are indeed taken in by the university and used for academics, facilities, etc.
I've always wondered if it might make sense to hive off college sports into "minor leagues", wholly owned (at least initially) by universities. They get to keep their revenue stream, and could actually hire players for their market rates. I guess it wouldn't have the emotional attachment or something like that that I don't really get about college sports.
All of this has basically already happened except for the part where the teams pay players market rates, so you can see where the universities would be reluctant to change anything.
Certain sports are a profit center for certain schools. Football at U-Texas, yes. Football or rowing at Rutgers, no.
They receive a disproportionate focus even when they are not. The main reason is academic politics: a physics professor is busy doing research, while the athletic department has time for lobbying.
I consider my athletic experience in college (on a varsity team which definitely did not make money or prestige for the school) to be one of the best and most educational parts of college. Do your really think there are many programs which lose money and are doing harm to the students or the university?
I see basically two types of programs: a handful which exist solely to drive money and prestige to the university (big-time football, basketball, etc.) without regard to the tiny number of students participating, and the vast majority which are mostly focused on their primary purpose, providing a great experience for the athletes themselves.
I don't see many programs which are sucking a bunch of money away from research for nothing.
Your athletic program did harm students - it raised tuitions for everyone. You probably got more benefit than the average tuition increase, but most students did not. Universities should not be in the habit of forcing all students to pay for the recreational activities of a select few.
Incidentally, universities pocket about 50% of research money and put it into the general fund, which then gets spent on stuff like varsity sports.
In a number of schools, athletic departments are self-sufficient, so it's certainly possible the parent poster drew no general funds for his varsity sport participation.
Further, your argument about recreational activities for a few can be applied to pretty much every non-class activity at a university, from theater to quiz bowl to student radio. Why single out athletics?
Actually, for the most part I do extend it to pretty much every non-class activity at a university [1]. I only singled out athletics since that is what we were discussing. As a rule, I believe the cost of non-class activities should be paid for in full by participating students, not by taxpayers or other students.
>Universities should not be in the habit of forcing all students to pay for the recreational activities of a select few.
Yes, thank you. If they're going to pay for someone to play football, they might as well fund me to play Chess or Go. They could probably also fund that guy down the hall from me to play Tetris all day; I'm sure he'd be able to find something "educational" in that.
How about playing an instrument? Acting in or directing a play? Dance? Painting? Drawing? Are these recreational activities, educational, both, neither? Is competing in a sport at a high level more or less educational than these things?
I read somewhere the suggestion that basketball and football players in big time programs have the option of majoring in their sport, just like a Dance, Drama or Art major might. At least it would drop the pretense that those students are doing anything else.
Right, but to some degree it seems self-perpetuating: the schools get big because they get money for sports, which causes to them to get bigger, so they put more money into sports, etc.
My question is, I guess, why aren't schools founded around the idea of education? It's the same feeling I have towards fraternities and sororities. I find it incredible that most people tout school as a place to learn, and yet it's quite obvious that a lot of people attend for any reason but that.
I don't think that playing a sport or living a fraternity/sorority prevents someone from getting an education at the same time. For the people that do those things to the exclusion of their education, they deserve to flunk out and lose their place at school.
My point was that so much extra time and money that could be focused on improving academics is spent by the university (and by donors to the university) on irrelevant activities. I don't really care what someone does in their free time.
Maybe the answer is more aggressive pruning, I don't know what it's like in America but in Australia someone can probably spend 5 or 6 years barely trying before they would get kicked out.
Depends on the school. I went to one of the smallest schools with a D1 football team and it is my understanding that the football team there only survives due to funds alloted by the conference, which are collected as dues from the other universities.
Also, where exactly does the funding for sports at major Universities come from?
I'm not totally sure (so please correct me if I'm wrong), but here are my best guesses:
- Money for sports complexes, stadiums, etc. mostly comes from donors who want to help make their alma mater more competitive and/or get something named after themselves.
- Conferences and the NCAA pay schools with money from sponsorships, TV contacts, etc.
- Schools are willing to spend some money on sports because it brings exposure to schools. For example, I'd be willing to bet that Butler's applicant pool is much larger next year due to their recent success in the NCAA tournament.
Except for a few, elite sports schools the funding for sports comes, in large part, from student fees and the general academic fund. Athletics is a highly corrupting influence on the university.
EDIT: It would be very hard to shift funding from sports to academics because it's a cultural thing now. People are much more readily accepting of spending x million dollars to build a new stadium than to build a new research facility.
> Except for a few, elite sports schools the funding for sports comes, in large part, from student fees and the general academic fund.
Citation or definitions needed.
For example, while Stanford is elite in some ways, it isn't a sports school. However, its "big athletic programs" (football, basketball, baseball, and possibly tennis) are more than self-supporting via directed donations and tickets.
The profits are used to fund less lucrative sports.
Well, citation is needed as well for the belief that sports brings in money. Do some research on the Google. Sports is a money loser for all but a handful of universities. You especially have to be careful when doing this research because universities are creative when it comes to accounting for sports expenditures.
I had access to Stanford's numbers. Its big ticket sports are profitable. The lesser sports aren't., although some are closer to break even than others. If Stanford has a loss in sports as a whole, it's because the lesser sports cost more than the profit from the big ticket sports.
And yes, that includes the new football stadium and the newish tennis stadium.
You have not the slightest idea of what you are talking about. Research sports spending at colleges and you will find that except for a few schools football programs do not support themselves. Few sports program anywhere or any type pays for itself.
"People are much more readily accepting of spending x million dollars to build a new stadium than to build a new research facility."
Really? It appears to me anecdotally that the run-up in tuition has been accompanied by a run-up in university building programs. My alma mater, a large state-related research school with a big sports program, is nearly unrecognizable ten years after I graduated, with a new IS building, a new science building, a new business school building, and a new law school building.
I read that Harvard spent tons of money on building projects they could no longer afford when the market tanked. None of them had anything to do with sports, if I recall correctly.
It might be the case for your school but the funding for sports at my school came from alumni, the overwhelming majority of whom were former athletes from the school.
The university did charge an athletic fee. This was to cover the publicly accessible tennis courts, basketball courts, football, baseball, and soccer fields. They also provide buses for the intramural teams. And part of it went to subsidize student football tickets to the nationally ranked football team, played in a stadium the football boosters paid for.
I've watched the college next door to me transform from a small community college to a full fledged university. And they got there by having a serious athletic program.
It's the case for almost all schools. Sports does not lead to increase in enrollment, generally speaking. Sports do not pay for themselves except at a few schools.
Wow, the ignorance here is amazing. Why is my comment being down voted? Only around 20 division I schools have their sports teams making money. All of the rest are subsidized by the general academic fund. Ignorance is bliss.
> It would be very hard to shift funding from sports to academics because it's a cultural thing now.
Sadly, you're probably right about this. Sports seem to have become so ingrained in the popular paradigm of what you do at a university that it would be impossible to change. Oh well.
so it may be that even in the Ivy League, which is on top of just a few sports, the sports generate more applicant interest in the universities, and thus help them recruit stronger (both physically and mentally) students.
If you eliminated sports, alumni giving would drop significantly, almost certainly by enough to offset the small gains you got from eliminating sports.
This is completely wrong. There is not a shred of evidence to support your statement here. Sports programs do not pay for themselves and almost never give money back to the general academic fund.
