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<p>I’m curious where you got that number, because I count fewer. I did encounter one sloppily-assembled search engine that listed 84, but some of these were clearly misclassified. For example, Bethany Lutheran College in Mankato, MN is definitely not public; we do have many Lutherans here in Minnesota, but we also believe in the separation of church and state, as the U.S. constitution and our own state constitution require. Same for Martin Luther College in New Ulm, MN; Mount Mary College in Milwaukee, WI; and Presentation College in Aberdeen, SD.</p>
<p>Still, 80 public D-III colleges is more than I had imagined. But it turns out they’re highly concentrated in a small handful of states: New York (26), New Jersey (9), Massachusetts (9), Wisconsin (9), and Pennsylvania (5) account for about 3/4 of the total. The Wisconsin schools are all units of the University of Wisconsin; the Pennsylvania schools are all satellite campuses of Pitt and Penn State; the New York schools are mostly units of SUNY and CUNY; and the Massachusetts and New Jersey schools are units of their respective states’ public university systems, the governance mechanisms of which I have not investigated. So my conclusion would be that if intercollegiate athletic subsidies at public D-III schools are a problem–and you haven’t yet persuaded me they are, given what you yourself acknowledge to be generally low levels of athletic spending by D-III schools–then that “problem” seems to be not so much a national problem, but a problem largely confined to a very small number of states and a very small number of state college systems. Forgive me if I don’t keep up on such details.</p>
<p>As for the football powerhouses, concededly they are few in number, but because of their prominence they are the first schools most people think of when people make wildly misleading and irresponsible sweeping statements about the nature of college athletic spending, and it turns out they’re mostly talking about small potatoes spending at small colleges that most most people have never heard of, located in a handful of states.</p>