… about his university’s athletics program. This blog chronicles tons of econ profs – people capable of actually running the numbers – who turn against their employers and detail the lies the schools tell about the money they’re spending on football. The latest guy is Colorado State University’s Steven Shulman.
[Student fees] have risen 45 percent since Tony Frank was appointed president of CSU in 2008.
Institutional support to athletics has almost tripled since 2008. These subsidies transfer resources from academics into athletics. As a result, CSU has not been able to increase instructional spending per student or protect itself from revenue declines.
Every time the state cuts CSU’s budget, the university is forced to cut academic programs. Only athletics is insulated from budget cuts.
CSU’s way-expensive new stadium hosts losing games attended by fewer and fewer people.
A commenter on Shulman’s column puts the matter well.
CSU [has] gambled $450 million (in bond repayments) on a sport that is a dying a slow death. Empty seats, phony bowl games, ethics problems – everywhere you look there are reasons to question the new stadium decision. The project can only be justified and supported by a few old alumni counting on tax benefits.
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That “old alumni” thing has UD thinking about how we might retrofit football into a truly twenty-first century university curriculum.
Pretty much everyone agrees football is over – dying a slow death, as the commenter notes.
Figure it’s got another twenty years as a professional sport, ten years at the non-southern university, and thirty years at the southern. (Down south, they’ll have to wait until the fan melee that turns into a mass shooting to really finish off the game.) It’s not too soon to start thinking about how we can excite our ahistorical students (postmodern Americans are ignorant of history, and live in what one theorist calls a “radical presentness”) in things antiquarian by featuring football, alongside, say, the Salem Witch Trials, as examples of pre-Enlightenment American ways of life. We might not be able to get our students to study Latin, but we can certainly interest many of them in the study of football, which will feature, for instance, field trips to massive rotting campus colosseums.
February 18th, 2018 at 5:05PM
It’s over here in Texas when public schools can no longer get liability insurance for football.
February 18th, 2018 at 5:14PM
JND: You’re right. My scenario is more dramatic, but yours is more plausible.
February 19th, 2018 at 6:54AM
A conversation along these lines has been taking place in the Polish Peter household, specifically about Ivy League football. As parents divert their reasonably intelligent sons from the football feeder track, the pool of prospects who can both meet the Ivy academic index AND play football at the Division 1-AA level is going to contract dramatically. Recruiting pressures will become unsustainable. At a certain point, it won’t be possible to put teams on the field. Which Ivy will drop football first?
February 19th, 2018 at 2:25PM
@PP, probably Columbia…..