While the current debacle over budget cuts has many students worried about the viability of a college education, “college” seems to be doing just fine. In fact, the national university brand is achieving unparalleled attention ““ in the athletic arena.
As schools are shaken up by disappearing funds, their sports teams are traveling the nation on chartered buses and starring in primetime television.
The question is: Where is this money coming from?
There is a long-held belief that popular sports are revenue machines ““ everyone wants Rose Bowl seats in the fall and a Kevin Love jersey in the winter. The idea is that football and basketball generate so much revenue that there is enough to cover all sports and more.
This is not the case.
Colleges and universities must be levelheaded when allocating funds for athletics at the cost of academics and student tuition support. They must remember that no matter the robustness of their athletic programs, they are only as valuable as they are fiscally viable and academically strong.
A 2006 NCAA study found that operating expenses for the 2005-2006 year were more than $500 million, a 6 percent increase from the 2004-2005 year.
Of this number, a total of more than $3 million was distributed across the Division I members.
In other words, schools like UCLA ““ schools already crippled with expenses ““ are saddled with million-dollar costs.
There are 329 active colleges in Division I; thus the average institution would be paying a total of just more than $1.5 million, which might not seem like a big ticket for a school as gigantic as UCLA, but not all schools enjoy the same luxury. Even for UCLA, however, it is ridiculous that such a cost is incurred on a yearly basis.
Murray Sperber, a professor emeritus of English and American studies at Indiana University at Bloomington, noted in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “For decades, while athletics departments have claimed that they balanced their budgets, critics have noted that that was true only if the subsidies that the departments received from their colleges and other sources were counted as revenue.”
The NCAA study now acknowledges this fact, making it clear that many universities that claim their programs pay for themselves are merely exploiting fiscal semantics to call what is really an expense for the entire university a revenue for athletics.
“The reality, which the NCAA now acknowledges,” Sperber wrote, “is that institutional subsidies for intercollegiate athletics usually come out of funds that could go to academic purposes.”
Sperber noted that the “median annual salary for ice-hockey coaches in the NCAA’s top division is $252,000.” Even worse, the median ice-hockey program produced just less than $1 million of red ink ““ a figure the schools had to pay for through subsidies that could have paid professors’ salaries or academic administrative costs.
Since the NCAA does not release statistics on individual schools, it is hard to know where UCLA falls on this spectrum. Regardless, UCLA is a part of this greater trend and, as the winningest university in the entire NCAA, should lead a greater effort to rein in ridiculous spending on college sports.
The Chronicle also quoted Myles Brand, the NCAA president, who acknowledged that expenses in college athletics have outpaced higher education spending by more than double in recent years.
Given the state of the economy, this is an even more pressing issue than it may appear to be at first glance.
This report stops at 2006, in the middle of a trend that has colleges paying much more for their sports than ever before. Over the past year and a half, fuel prices have soared, meaning fewer people might be willing to park on the freeway for a few hours waiting to watch what has been a dismal football team. Much talk has been made of the possibility of recession, which may translate into fewer season-ticket holders and fewer memorabilia purchases.
Students should be equally outraged at exorbitant athletic costs as they are at the UC Board of Regents for raising fees. The best way to prevent fee hikes is to lower costs, and athletics should be the first ““ albeit certainly not the only ““ place to look.
This is not a time when universities can spin major athletic expenses as “revenue” ““ this is not a time for this sort of reverse-Robin Hood business of taking from crippled academic and student-support programs and giving to the profiteering NCAA and athletics.
Big fan of sports but a bigger fan of not piling up debt to pay for school? E-mail Makarechi at kmakarechi@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.