Excerpt from the Dayton Daily News
A committee of Wright State’s board of trustees reviewing the school’s athletics department offerings and costs is the latest effort in a debate over how public colleges should pay for inter-collegiate athletics.
Wright State University spent about $10 million from tuition and public funds for its inter-collegiate athletic programs in 2019-2020, according to data from the NCAA. For fall 2019 enrollment of 12,392 main campus students, according to state data, that works out to about $800 per student.
Other Ohio schools also pay millions on sports, according to one national report. Miami University’s subsidy for athletics is $27.2 million; the University of Cincinnati subsidy is $29.7 million.
“The students who are paying these sky-high tuition fees often do not know how much they are indirectly subsidizing to sports,” said Richard Vedder, an economics professor at Ohio University. “You could argue that’s a moral issue.”
Rodney Fort, a sports economist at the University of Michigan, said there is a real value in the advertising sports brings to a university, but schools must keep the costs in line with the size of the school. A better athletics program brings in more students, which helps colleges be more selective in choosing their students and attract better faculty, he said.
“It’s no accident, right, that Big 10 schools, for example, are not just really good sports schools but really good schools in general,” Fort said.
Fort said the memories around college sports can encourage donations from alumni.
He said a better question is whether an athletic budget is too large relative to what a university ought to be doing. But if athletics wasn’t a good investment, universities “wouldn’t invest in it in the first place,” he said.
