How Much More Affordable Would College Be

[LordMorpheus]

Originally posted by: Gibsons
The athletic dept at many schools turns a profit.

Not at Rice, it doesn't. I'm all for keeping baseball, but screw our football team, they are terrible and have been every year in living memory. We have an all new coaching staff and they fancied up the stadium some for the big turnaround of our football program and we still lost our opener to UH - we beat them two years ago, if our dep't had turned around we should have beat them this year. More of the same.

Except they did throw and even complete some passes. In the past they just ran the option over and over again.

 

[erub]

At Texas A&M, the athletic department (well, lets be honesty here, football plus maybe some baskebtall) generates enough in revenue to pay for all of its facilities, coaches, scholarships, etc. It is entirely self-supporting, taking no money from the students, other than those who choose to buy the sports package (entirely optional, you choose it during online registration but almost everybody does it). It then pours money back into the general university fund.

At Georgia Tech, the sports package is no longer optional, but is a mandatory fee of $60/semester..about half of what I paid at A&M. Since I plan to go to to games, I am happy that it is cheaper

 

[kami333]

You do realize that even if you are paying full tuition, you aren't paying the full amount it's costing the school, right? I'm not sure what the break down is at public universities but at most private ones you are paying at most 2/3-3/4 of the true cost, the rest is being paid by gifts, endowments, etc.

 

[SecretShadow]

Its all well and good that sports program bring in revenue (and that revenue pays for the cost of whatever athletic scholarships), but how much of that revenue is slated to go back into non-sports spending at the university? Dividing it up between the other departments (sciences, humanities, mathematics, etc)? Improving the school's grounds/buildings (other than sports)? Providing a way for poor yet well-perfoming academic students to attend?

 

[Zenmervolt]

Originally posted by: Paddington
At Ohio State, if anyone says anything remotely negative about any facet of the school's atheletic program, the locals will go apeshit and lynch you from the nearest tree. The corruption of college with sports in this state just seems to be ridiculous. I think New York has it right with their SUNY schools that focus on academics first.

OSU reported over 100 million dollars ($100,000,000.00) in revenue from their athletic department in 2005/2006. You're probably looking at $10 million ($10,000,000.00) in PROFIT from Football alone. If the income to profit ratio stays about the same for other sports as football, OSU rakes in somewhere in the neighborhood of $40 million ($40,000,000.00) total each year from its athletic program in profits.

Now, OSU sure as hell doesn't spend all forty million on athletic scholarships, and that forty million is profit so the expenses of the stadiums, supplies, coaching and such are already taken into account before that number is arrived at. So, where does the majority of the forty million end up? Classrooms, lab equipment, academic scholarships, student activities, clubs, etc.

Money talks. When the chess club, or whatever pseudo-intellectual organization you favor starts bringing $40 MILLION in profit to the university each year, then you can start to talk about sports being superfluous. Otherwise, wake the hell up and realise that the football team is what brings in the money to allow academic scholarships.

It's times like this that make me embarassed to have been on a full academic scholarship when I was in school. Too many young punks think they're smart and start biting the hand that feeds them.

ZV