There is a great quote from Michael Lewis:
"If hedge funds could buy universities and then split them up so that the HF keeps the sports programs and they sell off the academic departments, they would most definitely do that"
"If hedge funds could buy universities and then split them up so that the HF keeps the sports programs and they sell off the academic departments, they would most definitely do that"
Academics, research, govt grants etc. are all means to that end.
https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2025/05/harvard-salaries-top...
https://www.bestcolleges.com/news/analysis/2020/11/20/do-col...
Debatable. Any college sports program could be dialed back to point where it isn't being subsidized by the primary mission of the university. American college sports is a global outlier. On that basis alone, I would bet that arguments for the value of college sports don't hold water.
[1] - https://www.forbes.com/sites/hbsworkingknowledge/2013/04/29/...
Don't get me wrong, I love Harvard, but at the same time, our hybrid of quasi public / private higher education reminds me a lot of our health care system, and I wonder if in a century, we'll look back on both as weird anachronisms.
Both of my kids attended public universities.
Disclosure: Notre Dame won the championship when I was in grad school there.
Although now that you mention the public/private distinction, the difference in that has been drastically reduced over the years as state appropriations have shrunk as a percentage of overall funding. You mentioned the Big Ten and "championship level in football", so let's look at Ohio State as an example since they won the last championship (and for what it is worth, they beat Notre Dame in the title game). They get only 10% of their revenue via state appropriations[1]. For sake of comparison, the OSU athletic department brought in a little over half that in revenue[2]. Meanwhile, 21% of the school's revenue comes from "tuition and fees", so offering an appealing product in the competitive market of higher education is incredibly important to their long term mission.
[1] - https://cga.ct.gov/2025/rpt/pdf/2025-R-0074.pdf
[2] - https://www.elevenwarriors.com/ohio-state-athletics/2024/01/...
Go Irish.
[1] - https://www.al.com/news/2024/01/what-economic-impact-has-nic...
What does exist is an outcome about who gets paid.
That's how an elite university should operate. Sport is fine. It's healthy. But warping the educational mission to feed the maw of an exploitative sports economy is something no university should be involved in.
What next? MMA as a college sport? It's a free country: beat each other's brains out. But to pretend that US college sports is anything but a grotesque distortion is disingenuous.
The question in my mind is if society would be better off recognizing the athletes as "workers" instead of as "students."
To offer a bit of contrast, I attended a Division-3 college where the starting quarterback was a physics major, and the captain of the basketball team majored in chemistry. When a Divsion-1 football player majors in a substantive discipline, it makes the national news.
To be clear I'm not in favor of eliminating college drama departments. But it's rather silly and arbitrary to claim that drama is somehow more important than sports.
If the endowment is paying for something that otherwise wouldn't be paid for generally, that's a different story.
For one, they put money into hedge funds as investors. And broadly, they're long on illiquid investments but have short term obligations for salaries, pensions etc. That's a hedge fund with a slightly different time horizon and intent.
Some of those short term obligations are covered thru grants, fed money. But when that dries up (eg, Harvard and Trump), you're squeezed.
As for sports being part of the college experience, I don't disagree with you that they are right now, but I don't see why that would have to be the case, since it certainly didn't use to be the case historically and still isn't the case in many parts of the world. From my perspective, they're so far removed from the actual purpose of universities that they've essentially marginalized the actual point of them for many schools, and the idea that they're integral to the experience is a sign of how much they've failed at their actual goal.
I think it tends to be in the Anglosphere at least. I won't really argue for the big college football etc. programs which has been an ongoing debate in the US for decades for Top 10 schools and related. James Michener wrote a book in the 70s or so. But athletic activities in various more or less organized forms are pretty established at many US schools and eliminating them would bring a pretty wide revolt (and not just talking about football).
As an aside, I don't think telling people that they haven't thought of things sufficiently is a particularly effective way of convincing them. There are a lot of potential other reasons someone might not agree with your point of view, and it's a bit hypocritical to tell someone else they're "not thinking things through" when you haven't actually figured out the reasoning behind their opinions.