How many Ball State University football games have you been to this year? All of them? A few? At least one? How many did you pay for? None, right?
Students get in to all Ball State sporting events for free. We all may think this is an advantage of being a student and quietly laugh as we see non-students actually paying to get in. But we are not getting in for free. In fact, we are all paying a very high price for Ball State's beloved sports. Not only do we have to pay for our own tickets, we help make the tickets for the general public cheaper. We are subsidizing the community's enjoyment of Ball State sports.
How much does each student actually pay for sports? The actual numbers are found buried in the annual budget. Using the numbers from the 2008-09 budget, there is a $1,464 dedicated fee charged to each full-time student. The dedicated fee is included in tuition and fees and is generally used for funding student services, technology, etc. Of this dedicated fee, 56 percent is used to fund intercollegiate athletics. This works out to $827 per student. The proposed budget for 2009-10 increases the amount allocated to sports to $877 per full-time student.
Interestingly enough, it costs only $216 for season tickets to all Ball State sporting events. That is admission to all events Ball State charges for: football, men and women's basketball, and women's volleyball. As far as marginal benefits, the season pass available to anyone is equivalent to the "free" admission available to students.
In reality, the vast majority of students do not attend sporting events and even though they do not attend, they are still being charged. I attend one, maybe two, football games a year. I would be much better off buying the tickets for $20, or whatever price on game day, and not having to pay $877. I would save $837. Ball State is making me $837 worse off. Why are we all being charged for something only a few of us use?
Ball State's intercollegiate sports department would operate in the red if not for the student subsidy. For 2008-09, the athletics department budgeted expenses were $14.3 million, two of the main revenue sources to cover these expenses were almost $8.9 million from student fees and $2.5 million from additional university support. Ticket sales were only expected to be less than one million. Intercollegiate sports, at least at Ball State, are not self-sustaining.
Maybe Ball State's athletics spending is in line with other universities. A recent article from Newsday.com, titled "Survey says college sports financially unsustainable," showed the results of a survey of university presidents about college athletics spending. The results showed that 80 percent of Division I schools' athletics programs have been losing more than $10 million a year.
The majority of presidents also agreed that coaching salaries are excessive, and there needs to be greater transparency when it comes to athletics. Ball State's football coach earns the second most at the university: $350,000, only $6,400 less than President Jo Ann Gora.
Currently on our tuition bill, we see some of the "dedicated fee" broken up. There are technology fees, health center fees and other student service fees. However, intercollegiate athletics, which is 56 percent of the dedicated fee, does not show up. Why is such a large percentage of the dedicated fee not itemized? Either Ball State does not think it is important for students to know they are spending $877 each year on sports, or they do not want us to know.
Greater scrutiny is finally being placed on out of control athletic spending. In the past year, due to the budget problems of almost all universities across the country, administrators were faced with how to allocate limited amounts of funds. Ultimately, spending increased on athletics, and cuts were made on the academic end (this includes Ball State).
According to a recent article in USA Today, faculty at the University of California Berkley have had enough. They were alarmed to find that student fees funded 11 percent of athletic expenses. They currently have a motion in their University Senate to require their athletic programs to balance their budgets, slow the spending increases and eventually end academic subsidizes to college sports.
Ball State students fund almost 62 percent of the athletic budget and ticket sales account for less than 7 percent of revenue. It seems to me that if the faculty of Berkley were angry about their athletics budget problems, the Ball State faculty should be outraged, as should students who are footing the bill. At the very least, the dedicated fee every student pays should be itemized to include "intercollegiate sports subsidy."
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