The athletic program deficit claim rests entirely upon accounting fiction.
Also, the committee has not consulted the people who are paying for more than 60 percent of intercollegiate athletics -- the students.
The deficit is improperly measured. The reported costs are substantially greater than true costs.
Reported "deficits" for the academic years 1999-2000 through 2002-2003 (the last is a projection) are approximately $48,000, $78,000, $162,000 and $286,000. The deficits were obtained by subtracting listed expenditures of the sports programs from revenue.
Included in expenditures are tuition payments charged to the Office of Intercollegiate Athletics by the central administration. Intercollegiate Athletics is charged full tuition for Indiana athletes and out-of-state tuition for non-resident athletes.
The projected deficit for 2003-2004 is $286,000, but Intercollegiate Athletics is charged $1,032,000 in out-of-state tuition for its 123 non-resident athletes. In other words, out-of-state tuition expenses are approximately 3.6 times greater than the deficit.
To educate a non-resident, it costs the university no more than to educate a resident.
Only if student-athletes on scholarships were taking the places of full-fee students would there be costs close to tuition, but there is no current capacity constraint and no evidence that qualified students are being turned away in favor of athletes.
Charging Intercollegiate Athletics out-of-state tuition simply diverts funds from athletics to the university at large. These are the facts.
Indiana's citizens are taxed to support Ball State. Should not out-of-state students pay more? Suppose we eliminate the 54 out-of-state grants allocated to football in the projected budget for 2003-2004.
Because the out-of-state tuition differential is $8,411, Intercollegiate Athletics would not transfer $454,194 to the university administration.
If the 54 football grants were allocated to Indiana residents, would any costs change? Of course not. Looking at revenue, only if equally talented football players were available from Indiana would there be minor changes. (State subsidies tend to follow enrollments of residents, though not precisely.)
Equally good players are not available from Indiana, so we recruit from other states.
If we uncritically accept this accounting, we believe that simply restricting football recruiting to Indiana more than wipes out the deficit.
Charging out-of-state tuition is accounting fiction. There are no real costs to the university for enrolling out-of-state athletes. Opportunity costs are the only real costs. (If you watch television, you are paying an opportunity cost; time spent watching TV could have been used otherwise.)
Out-of-state tuition is different. No extra costs are incurred by enrolling and educating out-of-state students. Because there are no differential costs, the differences in tuition payments are arbitrary.
Charging non-resident athletes out-of-state tuition is a subjective accounting device. All tuition payments transferred by Intercollegiate Athletics to the central administration are somewhat arbitrary. They are accounting devices, not reality.
Compare how Intercollegiate Athletics is treated with how the "average" Ball State student is treated.
According to U.S. News and World Report, more than one-half of students at Ball State received tuition discounts (financial aid). Why should student athletes pay more than the average student? They do not. Intercollegiate Athletics turns over a large part of its budget because of this accounting fiction.
Close to 60 percent of the budget of Intercollegiate Athletics is met by dedicated fees that Ball State students remit with tuition payments.
So, because of a fictitious deficit and an ad hoc committee that had no organized student input, programs financed largely by students have been eliminated.
This is outrageous. The Board of Trustees should insist that all university budgets, including the athletic budgets, be made fully transparent in detail and easily accessible to public and professional scrutiny.
Fiction can be profitable and fun, but it should not be confused with reality.
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