With Christmastime comes college football’s bowl season,
with games all day, nearly every day.
Starting last Friday with Buffalo against Charlotte in
the Bahamas (1,235 miles from Buffalo, 733 miles from Charlotte), college
football graces the airwaves until Jan. 6. After two straight weeks of
football, viewers will get a seven-day break until the national championship
airs Jan. 13.
College officials hope fans enjoy the games, because
the activities aren’t cheap.
In his book “Restoring the Promise: Higher Education in America,” Richard Vedder, Ohio University’s Edwin and Ruth Kennedy distinguished emeritus professor of economics, writes that college athletics “are increasingly expensive, often requiring substantial subsidization through student fees.”
Vedder, who discussed the book earlier this year at The Heritage Foundation, writes that between 2004 and 2015, “Division I public schools spent $71.3 billion on intercollegiate athletics,” and cites a USA Today report that found 21 schools spend “at least $100 million annually.”
To put these figures in perspective, Vedder estimates
that fewer than 1,000 students at any given school participate in college
sports, so “we can say definitively that there
are many schools that spend more than $100,000 per athlete annually on
intercollegiate athletics” (emphasis in the original).
In what Vedder calls the “costly athletic arms race,”
schools that struggle to compete for national attention with football factories,
such as Alabama and Ohio State, lose “close to $1,000 per student” on their
sports teams.
Vedder calls this the “athletics tax” on students.
Among the largest beneficiaries of this tax will be those walking the sidelines over the next two weeks. Alabama’s Nick Saban is paid $11 million annually, “over $21 a minute for every minute he breathes, day and night, 365 days a year.” The Birmingham News reported last year that Saban is the highest-paid public employee “by far” in the country.
Vedder writes that a small number of athletic programs
may generate enough revenue to fund other university activities, usually for
smaller sports such as fencing or scholarships. But he says “far more common is
for students to directly (via student activity fees) or indirectly (through
their tuition payments) subsidize the athletic operation.”
Universities’ college football budgets are just one
example of postsecondary institutions’ questionable spending priorities. Max
Eden, a Manhattan Institute senior fellow who reviewed Vedder’s
book
for the Claremont Review of Books, says universities are “shockingly
inefficient” and that higher education is “perhaps the most regressive
government redistribution, providing a benefit primarily to those with the
strongest economic prospects.”
Vedder explains why in his contribution to Heritage’s Not-So-Great-Society volume released earlier this year, where he writes that a smaller percentage of students from the bottom quartile of the income distribution are attending college today than in 1970.
This finding is astounding, especially considering the
size of student loan debt across the country, now at $1.6 trillion and
counting, Heritage’s Mary Clare Amselem writes in
her latest report.
How could federal loan debt have grown so large when a
smaller proportion of students from the lowest-income families are attending
college?
A new federal proposal to spend still more on federal
loans indicates “a lack of appreciation for the
damage that federal loans and grants have had on the American economy, as well
as the enormous cost of higher education.”
Amselem, Eden, and Vedder all write that
Washington’s ever-growing presence in higher education is not the solution but,
in fact, responsible for ballooning tuition costs and irresponsible budgets
that allow for the waste of taxpayer resources on campus.
“The worsening of the college crisis,”
Vedder writes, “coincides with the rise of the biggest source of third-party
payments, federal student financial aid.”
Thus, college football should be considered a guilty
pleasure this holiday season. You might as well enjoy it—you’re paying for it. Unfortunately,
college football is only one small part of a system of higher education spoiled
by Washington and badly in need of reform.
Source material can be found at this site.
