… seems to have drawn more than a few eyes to itself. Its description of universities across America making their financially struggling students pay through the nose for football games they don’t attend is apparently compelling enough to have caught the attention of people.
The Washington Post, for instance, cites the article, and goes on to note that more and more schools are
requiring students who have few discretionary dollars to pay for something that has zero impact on their classroom experience. According to the Chronicle/Huff Post analysis, the 50 institutions with the highest athletic subsidies have many more financially needy students than those universities with the lowest subsidies.
What’s more, nearly all the growth in Division I athletics during the past decade has come at public universities. At the same time these university leaders were obsessed with conference realignments and big television deals, taxpayer support for public universities has fallen to unprecedented levels.
But what’s most devastating in the Post piece is the long memory of its writer. We all know that when it comes to the bullshit promises that university presidents make about football, a good memory – to quote Elizabeth Bennet – is unpardonable. Yet Jeffrey Selingo goes there.
Nearly 20 years ago, I wrote an article about a group of universities that had recently joined the elite of college athletics: the NCAA’s Division I. They included California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo, Hampton University, Norfolk State University, and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
Ok kiddies so before I reveal the fate of those schools, go ahead and guess how well they fulfilled their presidents’ promises of huge revenue and huge increase in applications and huge prestige. Go ahead! Or – you don’t have to guess, do you? Because the names Cal Poly San Whatever, Hampton, Norfolk State and Whatsizface at Greensboro just come racing to your mind when you think of revenue and enrollment and renown and prestige… And all because of Div I football!
What’s more, look at the attention they’ve drawn to their sports programs!
[All] have been relegated to the backwater of college sports, with games on weekday nights on obscure cable channels. The only way many of these universities make it to the big time is to have their name appear on the stream of scores on ESPN’s ticker or as blowout fodder for elite programs.
That’s right. Not only did their elite Div I status do nothing (probably less than nothing) for their academic status, it didn’t even do anything for their athletic status. All at huge cost to their students.
Indeed Selingo is impolitic enough to trace the outcome of Greensboro’s Div I promises even more closely:
[Twenty years ago,] its student fees paid for 80 percent of the subsidy provided to the athletic department. Officials told me they expected the share of student support to fall over time as their teams established winning records and garnered more outside support… Greensboro students today provide 81 percent of the subsidy. In other words, nothing has changed except that the department’s budget has quadrupled since the late 1990s and the student fee for athletics has almost doubled, to about $700 a year per student.
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People wonder why universities keep doing this. I mean, eventually, as Selingo concludes, their students are going to leave in order to attend a school where they’re not “paying for someone else’s [child-like] dreams.” So why?
If you read this blog with any regularity, you know how UD answers that question. Her answer is very simple, and you will probably resist it, but she thinks she might be right.
They do it because they can’t think of anything else to do.
I mean, of course, some presidents – like the hack running notorious Florida State University – are anti-intellectuals whose animus against thought processes as such will always mean a teeny mouselike teaching staff and a titanic athletics program. And some big sports schools, such as the University of Montana, have scared away so many potential students with their rape statistics that they have nothing left but games and a few vocational courses. (Remember: Just as, at the end of life, hearing is the last sense to go, so at the end of a university’s life, football is the last activity to go.)
But most of the universities doing themselves in via football are simply overseen by people – academic leaders, trustees, even faculty (remember the many loyal faculty foot soldiers at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill) – for whom football (and sometimes basketball as well) is the very definition of a university. Their job is to worry about naming rights, beer sales, how many classes they can cancel around game days, cleaning up campus after tailgates, preparing for NCAA investigations, covering up crimes committed by athletes, building new stadiums, recruiting faculty who will help athletes cheat their way through their courses, and so many other things. They find these activities totally engrossing, and they will pursue them until vanishing state appropriations and vanishing enrollees force them to call it a day.
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UD thanks Prof. Mondo.
November 19th, 2015 at 11:25AM
CalPoly is well known for its engineering programs, which are excellent. I knew they had frats and a football stadium (because you can see them from the train), but I didn’t realize that they wasted money on Division I. How foolish. They would do much better spending that money on their engineering programs, which is the one thing they do well.
November 19th, 2015 at 12:24PM
The effective D-I tax on non-athletes at my institution is about $1700 each. That is only to cover athletics’ operating deficit, not any scholarships.
November 19th, 2015 at 7:01PM
CalPoly SLO is located near UC Santa Barbabra. UCSB dumped its D1 football program in ’91 because no one showed up for the games. Anyone who thought SLO would achieve football prominence when UCSB couldn’t must have been crazy….
November 21st, 2015 at 6:59PM
The student athletics fee is among the more loathsome manifestations of madness on college campuses. I cannot help but wonder what would happen if students en masse protested it at a major FBS school. UD would almost certainly have a field day with the responses of those defending the fee.
dcat
November 22nd, 2015 at 1:02PM
@dcat, what you asked for has already taken place, at the University of New Mexico.
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/05/01/new...
So what happened when UNM students voted against increased fees earmarked for football? The pres and regents told the people paying the freight to drop dead. So much for giving customers what they want…..