It’s time to rethink the financial toll of college sports

Take intercollegiate athletics. Across the country, Division I college sports represent a multibillion dollar industry like none other. It’s an industry where fewer than 10% of the businesses, the schools’ athletic programs, make money. Most of the programs are actually propped up by massive student subsidies, contrary to what many Americans generally seem to understand.

Every public university sports program in Virginia runs a deficit — every year.

The point is, college presidents and administrators make choices about how much students and their families will pay for sports. These are decisions that have a major financial impact. Then, they don’t tell the people paying the bills what those decisions are.

Most schools hide the sports numbers completely. A few provide the information publicly if you’re willing to take the time to look for it. Fortunately, the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV) provides detailed cost figures for college sports, although these numbers are only easily available by referencing an appendix to a relatively obscure annual report.

Using the official SCHEV statistics, a stark example of choices here in the commonwealth is provided by two state schools, Longwood University and the University of Mary Washington. They are virtually identical in size, small for state institutions of higher education, each with fewer than 4,000 full-time undergraduates. They are quite similar in other ways.

But there’s a big difference between Longwood and Mary Washington when it comes to student sports fees.

Using the official state numbers, every full-time undergraduate student at Longwood now pays $3,197 annually just for sports, even if they never attend a single game or match. At the same time, the sports fee for Mary Washington undergrads is “only” $891 per year per student.

Just to be clear, intercollegiate athletic fees, over four years, now cost a graduating student at Longwood over $12,500. This is more than $9,000 higher than the charge for a student at Mary Washington. And if a student takes longer than four years to earn a degree, that number will be even higher.

Longwood charges one of the highest per-student sports fees in all of Division I, something that very few people know, while Mary Washington chooses to play in the usually much less expensive Division III.

The point here is that the college administrators at these respective schools decided at some point their sports programs were worth the additional charges to students without garnering public feedback from the college community.

This needs to change. Tell the people paying the bills what they are being charged, and why, and let them have some degree of substantive input into the process. Longwood is not the only Virginia school at the high end of the spectrum nationally. James Madison University loses over $40 million a year on sports and has a mandatory student fee that is almost as high as Longwood’s. There are other Virginia schools on the high end of the national statistics.

Implement transparency, which means concise and easy-to-understand financial reports on sports programs, and then perhaps institute annual open meetings for college communities to weigh in on the cost of their sports programs. College presidents and their staff should be held accountable for their decisions. The people paying the bills should have an opportunity to weigh in, as well as faculty, prospective parents of high school students and state policymakers.

In 2015, the state legislature enacted an ineffective measure that sets some arbitrary caps for state college sports programs. Since then, sports spending and resulting mandatory fees have soared. What Virginia families actually need is transparency.

As state colleges and universities contemplate tuition hikes amid rising deficits in the wake of the pandemic, and students continue to accrue massive student loan debt, the expense of college athletics needs a full accounting.