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Comment by magic_man | Hacker News Reader

A coach probably brings more revenue into your school than any other employee.

Typically, it's only into the athletic department, though. At least at the big state schools I've been at, money from athletics/merchandizing/etc goes to athletics and only athletics. Beyond paying for athlete's education, etc, the money isn't going back into education in any direct way.

However, the coach's salary is typically paid out of the athletic revenue stream, not directly from state funds, which makes it a bit of a moot point.

(Note: To the best of my knowledge (which isn't much) this holds for Univ. of TN, Univ. of AL, and Univ. of WI. It's probably different at many other schools.)

Of course, all that having been said, the popular sports entirely fund all of the less popular, but still very meaningful athletic programs. There's also a _lot_ to be said for the secondary effects of having a popular sports team on the overall prestige and income of a university.

I never got the link between sports programs and academic prestige.

It is basically a marketing expense. There are countless reports of applications going up due to a successful sports team. When applications go up, a school can be more selective and choose better students. More selectiveness and better students will lead to a higher academic prestige. Basically anything that makes a school more attractive will eventually help bolster academic prestige.

Eh, I can see it for undergraduate admissions, etc. I'm very skeptical as well.

However, I know some very smart people who did actually choose their undergraduate program based partly on the football team.

I chose my school partly because I followed the basketball team as a kid. It's free marketing. I never heard of half of the small division III schools in my area, but all of the big state schools were on my radar because of sports.

>It's free marketing.

Expensive marketing.

that's a big chunk of everything,

when you buy a pop out of the machine, what fraction of what your paying for is raw material + production cost and what percentage is so the can pay for superbowl ads so the next time you're thirsty their brand is the first the pops into your head?

where you go for undergraduate engineering isn't that big of a deal, right?

In my case I said no to a top 10 engineering undergraduate school offering some scholarship and yes to the University of Alabama which was my grandad/dad's alma mater and thus our football team, an in-state school with cheaper tuition offering a lot of scholarship, and not Auburn University which had a slightly better engineering program rank but were UofA rivals. Had a _great_ uni experience and would make the same choice every time.

Had no trouble getting a job in a large company as a kernel developer straight from uni. Sure maybe doing MIT or Stanford I could have been a HVT for ~Google or I would have been in an impromptu startup by junior year.. but those student ticket prices!!!

Roll Tide. Still fly back a few times per season to go to games.

When the Virginia Tech football team made it big, the average incoming SAT score increased markedly.

A quick look for historical data failed, but if you can find the data, the big shift should have occurred with the class matriculating in 1994±1.

Correlation is not causation, but it's not implausible that notability in athletics can have sympathetic effects for funding and student quality.

If only there were a daily 'Science' section in the newspaper to go alongside 'Sports'....

the accounting that goes into whether a sports program is profitable or not is sort of tricky

scholarships are counted at the full tuition rate

its obvious that the marginal cost of educating 80 some football players isn't 0, but its not obvious that its the full tuition rate

a sizeable chunk of students are offered some sort of financial package to attend a university,

some non zero percentage of football players come from low income situations such that it is unlikely they would be paying full tuition sans the scholarship

also a dispropotionate number of scholarship athletes are from out of state, if they disappear its unlikely that the replacement 80 some students would be paying as much out of state tuition

Good point.

However, alumni donations are often strongly correlated to the performance of the sports teams (at universities with traditions of popular sports teams, anyway). Donations are a non-trivial part of a university's income stream.

Also, a prestigious sports team can definitely boost undergraduate enrollment. It's effective advertising, as several people have pointed out.

From an academic standpoint, I've seen the bad side of popular sports teams (_Heavy_ pressure on professors and TA's to give star players high grades despite a complete lack of attendance.). I personally feel like most (particularly in the southeast US) of the large schools with popular sports teams have absolutely awful undergraduate programs. That's partly just a function of being a large university, though.

There are certainly negatives along with the positives.

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