1. BC's tuition is higher than the actual cost per student!?
Yes.
Are you using some sort of variable pricing model where you are just looking at the individual costs for a student's room, board and classes and not real estate costs, admin costs etc...
Cost per student is an official measurement used by every university and the federal gov't. simply put, it's budget divided by number of students. At BC, the tuition is higher than the actual cost. At state institutions, tuition can sometimes be only 1/4 the cost per student.
I think the total cost to run a university has to be more than the tuition but I'm guessing whereas you seem to be on the inside (?).
When you factor in need blind admissions policies and the redistribution of 35-40% of tuition in the form of scholarships, this isn't the case.
Regardless of how you measure, my point is that there should be a before and after. To the extent you create new athletic revenues - if there is a symbiotic relationship as you imply, this should allow you to lower tuition. But instead tuition has gone up over the last 20yrs as the popularity and revenues from major sports has exploded.
Sports is such a teensy part of the budget that it shouldn't have a huge impact either way. We are talking about 5% of the budget, so in terms of the difference in TV dollars (say $20 million or in BC's case $17 million - $5 million =) $12 million, that is not going to make a major difference. Remember, at state institutions the cost per student is subsidized so there is no absolute relation between tuition and expenditures. As subsidies drop, tuition rises, no matter what happens with athletics. To give but one example, UCLA dropped its subsidy by $7,000 per student. If I were to guess that UCLA has, say, 40k students, that's a loss of $280 million a year. The rise in athletic TV revenues by $18 million is not going to offset the loss of $280 million much.
Besides, I was referring to the student activity fee. That fee is pretty easy to figure out. The fees these days are around $2k. So, begin by realizing that the intramural and recreation budget is not part of the ADs budget, so any fees counted as revs by the AD are for the sheer purpose of funding NCAA sports. You can divide the total number of fees by the number of students to determine how much each student paid in fees to the AD. At many schools, this figure is between $500-$1k per year.
I remember reading that when UConn went 1A in football it was partly because 1AA programs always lose money, but the best 1A programs had the chance to make money. Similarly men's basketball definitely makes money for UConn not to mention the intangible effects over the past 25 years since Calhoun and Geno came in. And again profitability is irrelevant, its revenue generation that matters. Add the intangible effect of building the brand and there's no question that for example the NCAA championship basketball teams generated way more for UConn than the value of their scholarships.
Andrew Zimbalist who studies sports at Amherst College has a study disproving this.
If as you mention later ["Expenditures haven't skyrocketed. Only tuition has. Expenditures are rising below the rate of inflation since 1989.] , then what the heck is going on?! Did colleges suddenly wake up and realize they were losing money because they didn't properly value/price tuition? Are donations down? I simply think if sports revenues are going up in order for this to be beneficial to the students either their costs should go down or the quality of the school (outside of just enjoyment of sports) should be enhanced.
What's going on is the end of the Cold War. From 1950 to 1990, this country poured money into education in research in order to outdo the Soviets. When coupled with the GI Bill, this meant that the USA created the best higher Education system in the world. After 1990, we started slashing funds for higher education. While expenditures didn't rise above inflation, schools were unwilling to voluntarily devolve, so they raised tuition to keep up with the Joneses. Schools have strategic choices ruin their academic reputations by slashing, or try to keep up. Most have chosen to maintain a certain standard, but we are at the point now that we can no longer do that. Standards for higher education will have to drop, and they have drastically. We went from 85% full time faculty to 30% in two short decades. As Mark Yudof (Chancellor of Cal.) said to incoming freshman at Berkeley: "You will pay more for less than your predecessors did."
There is definitely a direct relationship between colleges, sports and big donors. Presumably a school like Williams College gets alumni money from those who came for and want to perpetuate that experience and Notre Dame similarly gets money from those who want to perpetuate the big-time athletic portion of that experience. Removing that is scary and possibly a death blow to such schools. Not to get too philosophical, but a lot of people at Penn State might point out that ultimately sports took over what was supposed to be the primary mission.
This has been studied too. UConn is one of the lucky ones that have translated sports into greater notoriety. BC and Notre Dame as well. Some schools have succeeded. But the studies by Zimbalist and, for instant, David Hillier at Texas show that some schools, like Rutgers, develop a reputation as a perpetual loser that actually puts kids off from going to the school. Marketing can work in reverse, don't forget. Zimbalist seems to think that sports helps less than 10% of schools for marketing purposes. Look at the USNWR, lots of schools without bigtime sports. Boston U. just joined the AAU--it dropped football 15 years ago. Coincidence? Yes, probably. But it certainly didn't hurt them. Hillier did a study of Texas's AD revs, and he surveyed donors to the Longhorn Foundation. 65% of them were unaware that they were contributing to sports, and not the university.
2. Who knows if they'd be profitable or not, just like anything else in a capitalist society the profitable ventures would survive. The NCAA has created a monopolistic environment with all kinds of otherwise unnecessary costs and although the product is still expensive to produce its a lot less expensive b/c they don't have to pay the players. Cynically, if tuition was truly more expensive than pay they'd likely switch. I understand fully that for 90%+ of athletes even in major sports a scholarship is in fact a good deal (particularly in the long run) versus what they'd get paid. But on the whole and when you account for superstar players, the athletic programs reap exponentially more $ than the value of the scholarships for successful teams.
I think college sports would lose its sheen, if this were to happen. Students still see athletes by and large as fellow students. if you changed that relationship, college sports would probably die (everywhere else but the south and southwest).
3. Its already awkward and perverse. There's plenty of precedent and history of athletes getting money or cars and certainly at every level (high school) the hotshot athlete gets things the average student does not. This is a fact of life. Cliff Robinson said he didn't have $3 to pay me for a floor party, but of course I let him attend anyway and he got more than his share of booze, other* and women than anyone who helped fund, organize and host the party and we were happy to have him there. Most decide the ramen noodles are a worthwhile trade-off for the experiences.
