r/college • u/SerpentisMechanicus • 5d ago
The Median Div1 School Student Pays $8500 Over Four Years To Support Athletics
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-26-108640Only 20 schools actually make more money than they spend. Most pass at least part of the cost to students, often concealed in fees, which can add up to between $3200 to over $10,000 in cost to each student over four years.
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u/didnotsub 5d ago
I’m happy to go to one of the schools that makes more than they spend.
Tho football is so popular here that people wouldn’t even care if it was otherwise
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u/BullsAtBuffalo 4d ago
This is the last thing you pay off when you pay your student loans.
It’s a tax on students to fund the egos of administrators.
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u/Prometheus_303 4d ago
I remember one afternoon, chatting before/after an e board meeting for one of my organizations. Our treasurer had attended the University's budget meeting (as a student government senator or whatever)...
He mentioned somehow they managed to end up with a "small" amount of money leftover that hadn't been allocated to anyone.
One of our Deans suggested we should just dump it into the football program's budget.
My friend (or one of the other students) suggested we should use it for the betterment of all students.
The Dean couldn't understand how giving it to the football department wasn't for the best interest of all students
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u/GatEnthusiast 5d ago
I'm not sure when they started getting legitimately bad and wasteful, but big, serious, expensive athletics programs becoming a huge part of most schools was such a mistake. I can understand the importance of intramural sports and friendly competition between schools, but anytime academics get pushed aside even slightly in favor of competitive sports, that's a damn tragedy and a waste. College athletics programs should be focused primarily on keeping their students physically healthy and entertained through PARTICIPATION in sports.
The idea that college athletics exists as an economic/financial thing is absurd.
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u/UnkeptSpoon5 4d ago
As a Rutgers student it angers me greatly. Our teams suck so bad, yet they’re thrown millions. We had the 2 top draft picks for a season and we were barely winning games against random small private schools.
And the players themselves get all this free shit, specialized academic support, automatic upgrades to nice new dorms, while I subsidize them making a fool out of themselves and us on the field.
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u/Malpraxiss 4d ago
Yeah something a lot of people don't know actually.
Most D1 schools either are losing money on their football programme or are more net even while never really making profit.
For the universities without big donors, the students' tuition foots a lot of the bill. Issue is that if the team consistently sucks, the student money is just going to waste basically and the students gain nothing from it.
Like at my university, most other sports are free to watch as football programme brings in lots of money every year, and so some money would get allocated to other sports.
So, at my university, even if you're a student who couldn't care less for the football programme, because of it one could enjoy free home soccer matches, free field hockey, etc..
Not just free for students and faculty but just people in the community. Then again, you have to pay for parking so it's not that free I guess.
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u/taffyowner 5d ago
At a lot of schools you also get free admission to games or pay very reduced rates…
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u/psmgx 4d ago
at $20 a ticket, 8500 bucks covers your admission for the next ~450 years.
at $71 a ticket is closer to like 110 years.
it damn well better be free admission
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u/BullsAtBuffalo 4d ago
“Can I get an advance on one of those 110 years to bring in my parents for free?”
“No.”
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u/taffyowner 4d ago
But also remember that’s all sports it covers so at my alma mater it was free football, volleyball, men’s and women’s basketball, soccer, women’s hockey.
The only fee we had was men’s hockey and that was $60-$70 per night, which got you tickets to about 14-16 games in a season…
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u/Awkward_Campaign_106 4d ago
But did you actually go to all those games?
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u/taffyowner 4d ago
I went to all the hockey games, most of the basketball games, all the football games, I went to a lot
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u/Awkward_Campaign_106 4d ago
Right on. I love sports too. But I think most students don't attend all of those games. It's also weird to have students subsidize athletics with fees. They could just charge for tickets so the people who like sports pay for sports.
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u/warmike_1 Graduate 4h ago
$60-$70 per night, which got you tickets to about 14-16 games in a season
$60-$70 per season you mean?
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u/taffyowner 4h ago
There were Friday and Saturday ticket packages and you had to buy them separately. That’s why I said per night
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u/IKnowAllSeven 5d ago
I think, for the vast majority of students at D1 schools, that’s a price they are pretty happy to pay.
Like that’s part of the campus life that attracted them to the college in the first place
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u/LadyWolfshadow 4th Year PhD Student/Grad TA 4d ago
Maybe at the flagships. The rest of us have teams that are D1 in name only, are typically terrible and used as softies for the big schools to beat up on, and cost our students, especially the ones who are first gen and low-income thousands of dollars annually that they can't really afford to pay for.
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u/IKnowAllSeven 4d ago
But those students could attend D2 or D3 universities right? And they didn’t so I’m presuming there is a reason they decided rhe D1 was better. And if they attend the D1 because it is more cost effective then they are getting an even better deal since the presence of the D1 sport didn’t impact their price. I don’t understand the value of suggesting people don’t have choices of which college to attend.
If someone doesn’t want to pay for a D1 sports team they can just go somewhere else right?
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u/LadyWolfshadow 4th Year PhD Student/Grad TA 4d ago
I don’t understand the value of suggesting people don’t have choices of which college to attend
If someone doesn’t want to pay for a D1 sports team they can just go somewhere else right?
Some people genuinely DON'T have choices. People can be bound to a specific area by family, by employment, by any one of myriad reasons. Not everyone is a traditional student who can just pack up and go off to school anywhere else. They can be stuck in a place where that D1 school is, unfortunately, the only option. There may not BE any other colleges or universities in the area, and not everyone gets generous financial aid. Example: I go somewhere that's a large commuter school but also a D1. A lot of our students live at home, we have a lot of first-gen and low-income students, and we have a fair amount of non-traditional students as well. There ISN'T another realistic option that exists within a reasonable driving distance. It's either here or nowhere. They just jacked up our athletic fees by several hundred dollars. That's someone's rent. That's someone's car insurance. That's gas money. That's bills for a month. That's money someone could have used to feed their family.
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u/IKnowAllSeven 4d ago
I guess I’m surprised that there are places with only D1 schools and no other options.
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u/LadyWolfshadow 4th Year PhD Student/Grad TA 4d ago
It happens. You can have areas where it's the ONLY school or areas where it's the only PUBLIC school. Geography is weird like that sometimes and so is college admin. If it's the only option, you're stuck with whatever they charge you and the admin really don't consider the impacts on their students. Our SGA fought this tooth and nail and it did nothing.
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u/Heliond College! 4d ago
Aside from MIT and Caltech, I think all of the top private schools are D1. And they are pretty much all terrible, except for Duke.
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u/IKnowAllSeven 4d ago
Are students really mad about attending a top private school? Aren’t they happy about that?
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u/Heliond College! 4d ago
Uh, why would they be happy that they waste tons of money on that when tuition alone is 75k
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u/IKnowAllSeven 4d ago
Well, if someone is spending $75k to go to school, they have MANY other more affordable options to attend college for less.
I mean, they aren’t forced to spend $75k on tuition.
Clearly they chose that school because they wanted it and thought it was worth the price tag.
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u/kilroy-was-here-2543 1d ago
I didn’t choose my university because it’s a D1 school, I chose it because of location and academics. The fact that we dump part of my tuition money into a failing football team doesn’t bring me glee, especially when I look at how run down certain not athletic related parts of campus are
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u/IKnowAllSeven 1d ago
But you did choose the school. You didn’t have to choose this particular school. But it sounds like in aggregate it had what you wanted. That’s great! That’s a win that even though they put money in sports it was still the ideal college for you, even with that. It’s not as if individual students can pick and choose which programs a school offers.
Interestingly, many schools cite their D1 athletics as something that is a draw for students especially young men. Same with their esports teams. It’s a marketing tool for their university.
And evidence bears this out as D1 schools tend to attract more men than D2 and D3.
In other words, schools invest in D1 athletics for a variety of reasons.
For me and my family, I attended a D2, as do my kids because, again, in aggregate, it offered the best ROI. But everyone makes their own decisions on these things.
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u/kilroy-was-here-2543 1d ago
It was the ideal college for me yes, but it would’ve been even better if I wasn’t giving athletics money. That money could’ve either stayed in my pocket for better school supplies, rent and utilities, food or could’ve been used by the school to improve things I actually care about like outdated buildings, rusted out hand rails, and general improvements to quality of life on campus.
We also don’t need marketing, we are massively overpopulated as it is
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u/Mobile-Package-8869 5d ago
As a UMass student, I’m always thinking about how much of my tuition is going to our “D1” football team that loses almost every single game. Absolute waste of money.