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alp227

(31,960 posts)
Wed Apr 3, 2013, 07:39 PM Apr 2013

Forget Rutgers Coach Mike Rice: College Sports Abuse Virtually All Students

OK I know Reason.com and Nick Gillespie aren't the best sources for DU, but I follow Reason magazine's Facebook page because I might occasionally find an article I agree with WRT the drug war, police abuse, crony capitalism, etc. This article by Nick Gillespie (who's debated Thom Hartmann before, go to Thom's YouTube channel & search Gillespie's name) written in the wake of the firing of the basketball coach caught on video physically and verbally abusing players, has many valid points:

The vast majority of colleges—public and private—massively subsidize varsity sports directly out of mandatory student fees and other school funds. Despite the ability of top-tier teams to earn a lot of revenue via television contracts, ticket sales, merchandise sales, and other activities, most schools still hit up students in both direct and indirect ways.

Consider Rutgers, which dates back to the colonial period and is the flagship state university for New Jersey. According to a database compiled on an annual basis by USA Today, Rutgers' athletic department spent just over $60 million to field all its teams, pay its coaches, etc. in 2011. The school generated about $9 million in ticket sales, $7.6 million in alumni and corporate donations, $8.8 million in rights and licensing fees, and $6 million in other revenue. The school also sucked a whopping $9 million in student fees and another $19.4 million in school funds. When all is tallied up, USA Today calculates that Rutgers is subsidizing the operation of its athletic department to the tune of 47 percent of its expenses. Let's underscore that: This is money that is overwhelmingly going to field football, baseball, lacrosse, and other sports teams. It's not going to create new sections of Biology 101 or English 251 or underwrite the discovery of the next Streptomycin or publish the next Economics and the Public Interest or anything that remotely comes close to education or research.

Spending close to $30 million on sports is an odd way to signal that Rutgers' core function is as a research university. Tuition and fees for in-state undergraduates are about $13,000 a year; you might be forgiven for thinking that the $30 million being routed through locker rooms run by coaches such as Mike Rice could do more good by funding academic research, faculty appointments, or cutting costs to students.


In 2004, a Knight Commission study "concluded any links to football and men’s basketball victories and increased applications and the SAT scores of the applicants 'is small and not significantly different from zero.'” A 2009 report by scholars at the Wharton School of Business and Virginia Tech conlcuded, "applications do rise from two to eight percent after football and men’s basketball success, but 'the impact is often short-lived.'” When it comes to raking in alumni donors, the 2004 Knight Comission report found "The empirical literature seems to say that if the overall net effect of athletic success on alumni giving is positive, it is likely to be small." And then there's this possibility:

donations to athletics departments may cannibalize contributions to academic programs. As an April 2007 study in the Journal of Sport Management revealed, athletics departments between 1998 and 2003 received an increased share of gifts – from 14.7 percent to 26 percent - from university supporters even as overall giving to institutions was flat (Humphreys & Mondello, 2007).





I can't imagine current levels of spending surviving even casual scrutiny from parents, students, and taxpayers. Do folks paying for University of California at Riverside—an excellent school in a system which is basically imploding due to decades of fiscal mismanagement—know that students are shelling out $3.4 million in fees for a program that generates less than $100,000 a year in revenue and operates with an 85 percent subsidy? I'm guessing not.
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Forget Rutgers Coach Mike Rice: College Sports Abuse Virtually All Students (Original Post) alp227 Apr 2013 OP
great find on how this affects applications and entrants--it doesn't. yurbud Apr 2013 #1
sadly, none of this is the least surprising. niyad Apr 2013 #2
K&R DeSwiss Apr 2013 #3
That story turns out not to be true... alp227 Apr 2013 #5
Today, maybe.... DeSwiss Apr 2013 #6
k & r thanks for posting..... nt Stuart G Apr 2013 #4
 

DeSwiss

(27,137 posts)
3. K&R
Thu Apr 4, 2013, 03:01 AM
Apr 2013
McDonald's Cashier Job Requires Bachelor's Degree



- And once they've earned those expensive degrees at Rutgers, a jerb in the ''service industry'' -- maybe one even close to campus -- awaits......


"There are no political solutions, only technological ones, the rest is propaganda."
~Jacques Ellul
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