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Comment by makecheck | Hacker News Reader

A couple of anecdotes that really drive me crazy.

One, the amount of money universities can shovel at athletics is insane. It cannot be justified, I don’t care how many reasons you come up with. They pay millions to build stadiums, pay coaches, etc. while throwing chump change at people doing academic work. I have also seen hundreds of thousands of dollars thrown at things like ugly artwork and statues.

Two, the “chump change” I spoke of doesn’t even come close to scaling with cost of living. I don’t even know how there can be students in cities where housing costs are out of control, unless they are the children of millionaires.

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At least for schools with successful football or men's basketball teams athletics are generally run as basically break even programs. The money brought in by those two sports funds everything else.

And that doesn't even take into account the large alumni donations that big time sports programs can bring to a school.

Here, for example, is the University of Michigan 2015 budget (the first one I found googling):

https://record.umich.edu/articles/michigan-athletics-present...

Revenues: $151 million

Expenses: $145.9 million

Schools like Michigan are the exception. Try Oregon State, or UNLV, or a school not known for resounding success in several sports.

Oregon State - 24% subsidized sports program - http://projects.huffingtonpost.com/projects/ncaa/subsidy-sco... .

UNLV - 55% subsidized - http://projects.huffingtonpost.com/projects/ncaa/subsidy-sco... .

Then there's Eastern Michigan University, 83% subsidized (at $24M/year) - http://projects.huffingtonpost.com/projects/ncaa/subsidy-sco... . With 13K undergrads, that's $2,000/student/year.

That report points out that some 3/4ths of school have a 25% or more subsidy on their programs.

http://projects.huffingtonpost.com/ncaa/sports-at-any-cost , posted to HN 9 months ago at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10572373 shows that may programs are not breaking even, but are subsidized, and often from student fees.

They have a summary of the subsidizes at http://projects.huffingtonpost.com/projects/ncaa/subsidy-sco... . I counted 49 with minimal subsidy (0 to 25%) out of 204 schools. U. Mich. is one of those 49.

A lot of the time, a university will raise money for the stadium via private money and revenue bonds. So none of your tuition goes to funding the stadium, although the university likely doesn't profit.

Real estate and businesses have a vibrant financial market, so you don't necessarily need large figures to participate. You're not going to raise $100 million in revenue bonds for a professor to study sea slugs, because there isn't any revenue.

University administrators do not have the power to make investors fund sea slugs over stadiums. If you can convince the nation's pension funds, hedge funds, and private investors to somehow buy science bonds rather than revenue bonds, then the administrators would stop buying stadiums and start hiring sea slug researchers.

I would tend to agree that the money might be better spent on building up dormitory or apartment housing for students rather than stadiums, if the revenue and costs were equal. But I'd need to look at the financials.

Exactly.

And to piggyback on your comment, modern academic science is the way it is because their "investors" (i.e. granting institutions like NSF) have certain stipulations for grant funds or at the very least prefer certain applications over others. Applications that have some aspect dealing with STEM education, for example, are incredibly popular with NSF and other institutions at the moment.

When you talk to research academics in the sciences, they often complain about what a burden education and outreach are on their time. Most of them would rather spend 100% of the time on their research. However, their public sector "investors" have an agenda for how their money is spent. They want to see certain results - it's not just enough to see more sea slug research, they want to have grantees also encourage STEM education growth.

The outreach stuff itself isn't that bad, and it can be fun to see a bunch of 'civilians' get excited about a topic that you yourself care deeply about. It is frustrating that you need to shoehorn it into all sorts of proposals where it doesn't make a ton of sense: Why is the funding for a bunch of PhDs to study A linked to their willingness to explain B to a bunch of K-12 students?

On the other hand, the administrative stuff (writing your own grants, reviewing other people's papers and grants, and getting things like purchase orders and experiment approval through the university) takes a huge amount of time and is fantastically unrewarding.

>It cannot be justified, I don’t care how many reasons you come up with.

Of course it can be justified if the university is pulling in more money than it's spending. Athletics are a profit center for the stronger programs.

Accepting that that's actually true - and we know how flexible accounting is not just when you apply a will to bend the numbers but also when you have a bias (same as working with any data) - then it's only true within the system of "a university is a business". Whether it makes sense from any other perspective is quite a different matter. There are those (like me) coming from cultures where not everything was or is a business, and there is no such believe that making everything a business makes it better.

I've been yapping this for ages. Apple or Google can't just start selling nuclear submarines to the highest bidder even if it meant huge profits if such an enterprise took the leadership away from what they currently do.

It isn't just money (and most universities LOSE money in athletics) but rather the change in culture with high spending in spectator sport. The top level leadership at universities is increasingly detached from academia.

I get that there needs to be some spending in support structure but the first and main goal should be education. Too much money (and more importantly attention) is being wasted in brand recognition and marketing.

Side note: would it be possible for universities to build small private cubicles/rooms or something assigned to each student where they can go study or whatever (probably with noise restrictions and so on to prevent distracting neighbors)? Even at its best, such a place would hardly be something a university can boast in its marketing pieces unlike a 80k seat football stadium.

> small private cubicles ... with noise restrictions

like study carrels in a library?

Yes but instead of booking an available room or cubicle, everyone gets their own. Sort of like a dorm room but just a desk and a small closet/locker? Just brainstorming ideas. I was talking to someone about what college libraries can do to stay relevant in fields like computer science...

Athletics are a profit center for only a few universities. I doubt though that this includes spending on stadiums. There is also the cost in terms of corruption of the university and the damage done to athletes (especially American football) for little to no compensation.

http://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/media-center/news/athlet...

They're also only a profit center if there are other universities willing to make a loss. If those universities decided to stop spending on athletics then the profitable ones would soon find their profits disappear. Taken as a whole, the college athletics industry is an overall negative sum for education. Looking at it from the perspective of an individual college misses the big picture.

At one point in my graduate career, my university was paying the last two basketball coaches more than $100,000 each because they had been so bad at their job they had to fire them but their contracts had multiple years left on them -- including one who had been in trouble for NCAA scholarship violations in the past and shockingly got caught violating the rules again while he was at my school.

Meanwhile I didn't even have dental insurance...

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