http://projects.huffingtonpost.com/ncaa/sports-at-any-cost
There’s something wrong about this.
Student Fee funded gladiatorial games to ensure the steady flow of alumni donations
I don’t think that student fees are going entirely to support the athletic department. In my day, we paid a student activity fee and it went to all kinds of clubs that I wasn’t interested in. If you were a student club, you could put in for funds. Our fees also went to the recreation center, intermural fields, to the marching band, to the student union facilities.
But if students at William and Mary really paid $1500 per year just for their varsity athletic teams, they should go to a different school if they don’t want to support athletic or their parents should vote out the board of regents or whoever runs the state universities.
As usual HufPo is not very accurate. The fee for Varsity Athletics is $880 out of the $2K General Fee. http://www.wm.edu/offices/financialoperations/sa/tuition/undergraduate/fall2015/index.php
The numbers in the link above are per semester. So the total yearly Intercollegiate Athletics fee at W&M is (879.50+10) x 2 = $1,779.
If I were a student I would be annoyed. In-state tuition of 19K+ is a lot.
@Erin’s Dad The report was prepared with the Chronicle of Higher Education, using statistics from the universities themselves.
"In the past five years, public universities pumped more than $10.3 billion in mandatory student fees and other subsidies into their sports programs, according to an examination by The Huffington Post and The Chronicle of Higher Education. The review included an inflation-adjusted analysis of financial reports provided to the NCAA by 201 public universities competing in Division I, information that was obtained through public records requests. The average athletic subsidy these colleges and their students have paid to their athletics departments increased 16 percent during that time. Student fees, which accounted for nearly half of all subsidies, increased by 10 percent. "
I saw the W&M tuition as $15000+ and fees of $5300. That’s a school, like U Mass, where the fees are huge. One of my kids goes to a school where fees are like $400 per semester, and the other about $800. That’s total, and I’m not sure what goes to athletics as it is not broken out. Both get into any athletic event with a student ID at no extra charge, and to all student facilities like the gym, the student union, etc.
However at UW-Madison, $0 in student fees goes to athletics.
http://projects.huffingtonpost.com/projects/ncaa/subsidy-scorecards/university-of-wisconsin—madison
Perhaps. But, to be fair, you have to ask the students. For example, at my alma mater, the then-current students actually voted to increase the student fees to support the athletic department.
I’m not sure why people consider it worse to subsidize intercollegiate athletics out of student fees than out of “institutional support,” i.e., the university’s general fund. That strikes me as just an accounting difference.
For example, according to the Chronicle-HuffPo data, the University of Iowa subsidizes 1% of its athletic department budget, for a total of $3.1 million in subsidies between 2010 and 2014, and 100% of that subsidy came from student fees, Meanwhile, the University of Wisconsin-Madison subsidized 6% of its athletic department budget, for a total of $37.0 million in subsidies between 2010-2014, but 0% of the subsidy came from student fees; 100% came from “institutional support,” i.e., the university’s general fund. So which students were worse off? Iowa could have eliminated the student fees and instead raised tuition by enough to generate $3.1 million in additional revenue going to its general fund, thus allowing it to subsidize the athletic department out of “institutional support.” Conversely, Wisconsin could have offloaded its $37 million in athletic department subsidy onto student fees, and had a $37 million cushion in its general fund budget over the 2010-2014 period. That cushion could have been used to lower tuition, or to forego some fraction of tuition increases; or it could have gone to need-based FA. (Note that Wisconsin doesn’t come close to meeting full need).
Either way, students (and their families) are taking it in the shorts—more so at Wisconsin, I submit, where the athletic department subsidy is 12 times larger than at Iowa. And subsidizing the athletic department out of the university’s general fund is less transparent. At least students at Iowa know how much they’re spending to subsidize intercollegiate athletics—it’s right there on their tuition and fees statement. At Wisconsin an even greater amount of the students’ tuition dollar disappears into that mysterious black box known as the general fund, and comes out the other end as a whopping subsidy to the athletic department.