<p>Division IA schools waste your tuition dollars (my comment).</p>
<p>"The facilities arms race in college sports has a new frontier: academic-services buildings.</p>
<p>Over the past decade, a dozen major college programs have built stand-alone academic centers, most of them for the exclusive use of athletes. At least seven more colleges are planning new buildings or major renovations in coming years. Some facilities are as big as 50,000 square feet the size of some student unions and many are as swank and well appointed as any buildings on a campus.</p>
<p>The facilities growth, paid for largely by private donations, is at the center of a spending boom in academic support for athletes, a Chronicle survey has found. Since 1997, the budgets for academic services for athletes at more than half of the 73 biggest athletics programs in the country have more than doubled, on average, to more than $1-million a year. One program spent almost $3-million in 2007 an average of more than $6,000 per athlete.</p>
<p>Spending has surged for several reasons: Competition for players has eased admissions standards in recent years, while the National Collegiate Athletic Association's academic-progress requirements have stiffened. That means it's easier for an athlete to get into college but harder to stay eligible for sports."</p>
<p>That "private donation" could have gone toward an academic building instead. If the administration had a conscience, they would direct the donation toward academic support for all students. It is sick, pathetic, and disgusting.</p>
<p>How do we even know it's coming from tuition dollars, if it isn't coming from private donations (which are usually the source)? For universities that have huge endowments, it's probably coming out of the endowment payout. That's the result of investments from a separate company that manages the endowment on the university's behalf. For these same universities, it's not as though the spending on athletics is harming the quality of other parts of the university; after all, there's plenty of money to go around at these universities.</p>
<p>"That "private donation" could have gone toward an academic building instead. If the administration had a conscience, they would direct the donation toward academic support for all students. It is sick, pathetic, and disgusting."</p>
<p>You have no basis for that statement in fact. There are academic boosters and sports boosters and often they can turn one into the other and get both but people with millions are not that easily led. At Wisconsin success in sports has been mirrored by unprecedented success in raising money for academic buildings and programs. Each area has its own patrons.</p>
<p>^ You can't assume that private donations for academic support services for athletes would translate easily into private donations for general academic support. Some schools have athletic booster clubs that raise money to support athletics. Many of the members of these clubs aren't even alumni. In much of the South and in the Great Plains states, for example, NCAA Div. IA sports are the only "big-time" sports in the entire state, and pretty much the entire state population makes up the school's fan base. These folks might be happy to help out "their" sports teams by paying for academic support facilities and services that will help keep top athletes in school (or gain NCAA eligibility in the first place), but have no interest in supporting the school's broader academic programs. </p>
<p>You also have to consider that in the most successful programs, football generates enough revenue through ticket sales, concessions, TV rights, and royalties on athletic wear and related paraphernalia to fund the entire athletic department budget (including club sports, intramural sports, and phys ed classes for non-athletes) and still have enough left over to pour the excess profits into the school's general fund to support general academic programs. In the Div. IA schools I'm most familiar with, athletics are not a drain on the academic budget, but instead are a valuable profit center providing supplemental revenue to the school's general fund.</p>
<p>Hate it or not, colleges are corporations too.</p>
<p>I wonder how UCLA became so famous? I wonder why Florida recently had a surge in admissions the past 3 years? I wonder how George Mason went from an unknown college to getting enough revenue to design 1/3 of its facility in only a year...</p>
<p>...hmmm....</p>
<p>oh yah, SPORTS. For such intelligent people, you guys lack that broader understanding from dynamic viewpoints...</p>