OTish: Power 5 schools (and others) charging students mandatory fees to bankroll athletics departments

Submitted by chickenpotpie on

I'm interested what you guys think about athletic departments charging students mandatory fees (ranging from maybe $40/year to almost $700/year at UVA) to help bankroll the athletic department. 

Does anyone know if Michigan does this? If so, do you think it's fair?

My thought is that it can go both ways. On the one hand, a successful football or basketball team often helps the prestige of the school (and, by corollary, drives up the prestige of the degree to some extent). On the other hand, I can see how someone can say that it's unfair to force students to pay for something they might not want to utilize by going to games (though students are charged fees for general facilities upkeep, regardless of whether they use those facilities, sooo ... is this different?). 

Here's the Washington Post article that got me thinking about this: link.

(Also, this is my first board topic, so please be kind). 

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MGoBender

December 1st, 2015 at 8:20 PM ^

 


Michigan doesn't do this. The athletic department is fully self financed.

This is kinda not totally true anymore.  Michigan started charging students a Recreation Fee.  You can find it on page 16 here:

http://ro.umich.edu/tuition/archive/documents/Fee%20Bulletin%2015-16.pdf

I believe the one year the prices for football tickets jumped up $100 was because of the huge rec facilities upgrade (including field turfing Mitchell and totally renovating the IMSB).

Now, this isn't the athletic department per se, but there are some parallels here.  Not long ago the line between Rec Sports and the AD proper was much grayer.  Now that Rec Sports is housed under the Student Life, the distinction is more clear.

However, upgrades to Rec facilities do indirectly help the AD proper since many varsity and club teams share various facilities with Rec Sports. 

For those not wanting to click and search, this school year the Rec Facilities upgrade fee was $65 for a FT student.

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sadeto

December 1st, 2015 at 9:16 PM ^

This isn't going to the AD, it's to renovate facilities that are for general student use. Student athletes share a lot of facilities with the general student population. The point stands, UM doesn't subsidize its AD outside of the small facilities services mentioned in another post, and UM doesn't even need to cover losses such as last year's.

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StephenRKass

December 2nd, 2015 at 9:22 AM ^

I don't remember the details, but I remember student fees when I was enrolled at Michigan. Now, the total room, board, tuition, and fees for a full year at Michigan as an in-state student was well under $4,000 in the late 70's. Which is a much different animal than the costs for students today.

Having said that, I also remember thinking that everyone pays for the service, and it is up to them whether they use it or not. This is true in almost every avenue of life. For example, I pay taxes which support the local library, and the local park district, and the local school district. I pay these fees, regardless of whether or not I benefit or use the attendant service provided.

There is very little in life that is "free." Someone is paying the cost. We don't really want a society where every last thing is a la carte, and you only receive benefits that you yourself pay for. The idea of many costs is to amortize the cost over a large population, for the general good of all. That's how all societies work, including the university community.

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coldnjl

December 1st, 2015 at 7:24 PM ^

I don't have a problem with it. #1: it is as part of the college experience as any other University funded endeavor (which you pay for- be it the gym, student groups, etc-whether you use it or not) and #2: It is essential advertising that boosts both future applications and prestige.

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bluebyyou

December 1st, 2015 at 7:50 PM ^

Lots of kids are amassing significant student debt that is very hard to pay off.  I can see why some kids might not be happy, particuarly if you are paying the higher end of the range.

There are only a couple of dozen schools whose athletic programs run in the black.  At Michigan, we are very lucky that our athletic department typically makes money.

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robpollard

December 2nd, 2015 at 10:23 AM ^

EMU charges $30/credit hour in "General fees" which includes "facilities, athletics, health center, computer labs, performing arts." Not sure how much of that goes to athletics, but I don't think it's a lot.

Much more important is the $10 million per year deficit the athletics program runs. That comes directly out of the larger budget, leaving less money for anything academic. It's a downright scandal.

If EMU can't, within the next 2-3 years, figure out a way to get that deficit way down, they should drop their football program down to FCS. I know that would cause issues with the MAC, but I don't care. EMU shouldn't be shoveling $100 million a decade at an athletics program when the school has so many other important needs. No one goes there b/c of football (which is the primary driver of the deficit), so stop spending so much money on it.

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Mr. W

December 1st, 2015 at 7:30 PM ^

This is nothing new and has been going on in athletic departments for years. Doesn't answer your question on fairness, but the Washington Post didn't break anything new. Some of the best data on this is from the USA Today as they show revenues, expenses, and subsidies for each athletic department. The designate "subsidy" as the sum of student fees, institutional support, and state money. Interesting enough, Michigan receives just over $256,000 (0.16% of their revenue) from subsidy which most likely is from direct or indirect institutional support.

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sadeto

December 1st, 2015 at 8:05 PM ^

This has been discussed many times on this board. The $250k UM "subsidy" is the value of facilities services that don't fall under the AD, but are provided to AD facilities and not charged (just as they aren't charged to any facility on campus). 

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CTSgoblue

December 1st, 2015 at 7:54 PM ^

My wife got her Master's degree from EMU and it drove me crazy paying those fees. She took nearly all of her classes at sites away from campus and we would never attend an EMU game. It sucks for part-time grad students to be subsidizing a terrible athletic department.

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MGoBender

December 1st, 2015 at 8:25 PM ^

There's zero benefit to that for a part time grad student who is never on campus. We paid more for her to subsidize their AD than we paid for student tickets at UM during undergrad.

From the sounds of it, there was a lot your fiance didn't take advantage of, but paid for: University unions, computing fees, rec gyms etc etc. I don't think it's fair to really complain about not taking advantage of stuff. Really, they could just fold it all into tuition some how and you wouldn't know or care.

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CTSgoblue

December 1st, 2015 at 9:16 PM ^

True. I focus on athletic support because it was a significant cost--you basically are held captive to pay for a product (athletics) that the market doesn't want (low attendance, sustained poor results, unwillingness to pay on elective basis). If it was up to me, I'd consider taking EMU out of D-1 altogether and chop the hell out of the budget.

For the record, I'd also unbundle cable packages, which I think is a similar issue.

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Gulogulo37

December 2nd, 2015 at 9:23 AM ^

I don't think those are adequately similar though. You're talking about things like computer access, which is pretty important, especially for poor students, and a gym, which is obviously good for one's personal health. Those seem way different from subsidizing an enterprise in which there are coaches and an AD paid a boatload of money.

At my grad school, I saw a couple of cool concerts for free on campus and thought it was pretty sweet but soon realized, "Wait a second. This isn't free. I'm paying an insane amount of money to be a student here." Certainly you wouldn't want to strip out all campus life, so there is certainly some gray area, and if it's something like 50 bucks then whatever, but I'm against subsidizing athletic departments in large amounts. $700 a year at UVA? That'd be infuriating to me if I was a student there even if I was going to the games.

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CTSgoblue

December 1st, 2015 at 9:25 PM ^

I think they changed up their fee schedule a bit in the last decade but I recall them running a $10+ million annual athletic deficit. With enrollment of 23,000, that's a whopping $435/student/year. About 5-6k of the enrollment is grad students that pay fees for little/no benefit.

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Class of 1817

December 1st, 2015 at 7:56 PM ^

I can't imagine a strong body of evidence showing that a good football team raises the prestige of an academic degree. So I'm not sure that this argument actually goes both ways.

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MGoCadet-Vicar…

December 1st, 2015 at 9:04 PM ^

Most studies that attempt to regress athletics (football and basketball) success with enrollment find no statistically significant impact. I wrote an Econ paper on this myself, I looked at success over two seasons followed by apps received and enrollment the next two and there was not significant correlation. Not to say some small schools can't catch lightning in a bottle, a la app state, or fgcu

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Asgardian

December 2nd, 2015 at 9:53 AM ^

http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/devin.pope/research/pdf/Website_SEJ%20S…

Empirical studies have produced mixed results on the relationship between a school's sports success and the quantity and quality of students that apply to the school. This study uses two unique data sets to shed additional light on the indirect benefits that sports success provides to NCAA Division I schools. Key findings include the following: (1) football and basketball success significantly increases the quantity of applications to a school, with estimates ranging from 2% to 8% for the top 20 football schools and the top 16 basketball schools each year, (2) private schools see increases in application rates after sports success that are two to four times higher than public schools, (3) the extra applications received are composed of both low and high SAT scoring students, thus providing potential for schools to improve their admission outcomes, and (4) schools appear to exploit these increases in applications by improving both the number and the quality of incoming students. 

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UMich2016

December 2nd, 2015 at 12:06 AM ^

"I can't imagine a strong body of evidence showing that a good football team raises the prestige of an academic degree. So I'm not sure that this argument actually goes both ways."

Actually very false.  In the late 1800s schools like the University of Chicago, Princeton, and Harvard all leveraged their athletic success to increase admissions and therefore attract a larger body of students, allowing them to become more selective and have a stronger student body.  For a more recent comparison, look at Ohio State.  The schools academics are increasing (unfortunately) and theiir athletics have been as good as ever in the late 2000s (went to both championship games in football and basketball in 2007 I believe).  Definitely a correlaton.

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Blue Durham

December 2nd, 2015 at 10:03 AM ^

Ohio State's academic reputation has increased due to a shift in state policy in making it the flagship of the state schools. This began back in the 1980's I believe. The school was a football power under Woody Hayes when their reputation was much less than it is today. I think this is a case where, if you seem to see any connection, correlation is not causation The Ivy Leagues were football powers back in the first half of the 20th century, but their reputation as the premier academic institutions far preceded that. Ditto U. of Chicago. Other great, incredibly prestigious schools like MIT, Cal Tech, Swathmore and other small, eastern liberal arts collages never had a serious football program. Over the years the top football schools have just as likely come from marginal universities like Oklahoma, LSU, Alabama (and well, the rest of the SEC other than decent schools Vanderbilt and Florida), Florida State, and Nebraska rather than schools like Northwestern, Duke, Stanford, Notre Dame, Virginia, Californa and Michigan.

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Wolvie3758

December 1st, 2015 at 7:59 PM ^

and we have one of the best overall Athletic and Academics institution in America...Im pretty good with that

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Olaf

December 1st, 2015 at 8:09 PM ^

This is very common around the country. As a student I didn't even notice it. If I had noticed it I wouldn't have minded. LIke another poster mentioned it is part of the entire experience as a student.

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BlueMk1690

December 1st, 2015 at 8:41 PM ^

because you're basically paying someone else to go to college for free and play a sport no-one cares about.

At schools where students actually care about athletics, the teams they do care about typically make money i.e. the so-called revenue sports which often are used to cross-subsidize other sports as well.So this money of course goes to fund those programs as well and your money most likely ends up with some program that only exists to satisfy Title IX requirements in the first place.

 

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BlueMk1690

December 1st, 2015 at 9:28 PM ^

Many students (perhaps even most) don't actually want to go to sports events at a lot of schools and there's little value to being able to attend such events. Even at a place like Michigan most students won't turn up for the women's lacrosse or water polo events.

While no doubt fringe elements of the student body take great joy from even those events, the question why everyone else should pay for it remains unanswered.

 

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