POSTED BY MARTIN KICH

On February 24, the following item was posted to the blog of the Ohio Conference of AAUP:

OSU Athletics No Longer the Exception to the Rule

In October of last year, we published a blog post about how much Ohio universities were subsidizing their athletic programs during the 2017-18 academic year.

We indicated that Ohio State was the only institution that has not had to subsidize their programs, as they have been able to generate enough revenue from ticket sales, donations, TV deals, and other sources to not only cover their expenses, but typically generate a surplus, too.

However, a recent article published by The Columbus Dispatch reported that Ohio State was in the red for Fiscal Year 2019 by over $10 million, based on what the university disclosed to the NCAA.

OSU’s athletic director and other administrators contend that, while the institution did incur a deficit, it was just over $600,000, not in the millions. They attribute the discrepancy to accounting changes.

Nevertheless, it is astonishing that The Ohio State University—one of those few football powerhouses in the country that generates hundreds of millions of dollars—still managed to produce a deficit last fiscal year. The very different reports on the size of the deficits beg the question as to whether OSU and Ohio’s other institutions should undergo full independent athletic audits so that students and taxpayers can see how their money is being spent.

 

That earlier post included the following graph:

The graph should be especially concerning because in Ohio, as in most other states, the state subsidy has declined dramatically over the last four decades, and it had not returned to the levels before the 2008 recession—even before the Coronavirus pandemic made it a near certainty that further reductions are coming. So, as the burden for paying for college has shifted dramatically from the state to students, who have assumed more than a trillion dollars in debt, spending on athletics has soared—and much of the cost is coming out of the pockets of our students.

 

The News Record, the independent student newspaper at the University of Cincinnati, recently published an article that went an important step beyond the graph posted to the OCAAUP blog. The student journalists looked at the deficit spending on athletics beyond a one-year snapshot and tracked it cumulatively for some of the public universities in Ohio besides Ohio State:

In the subtitle of the article in which this graph appears, it is highlighted that over the last twelve years, the athletics subsidy at UC has amounted to a quarter of a billion dollars. (The full article, written by Matt Huffmon and Samuel Schell-Olsen is available at: https://www.newsrecord.org/news/red-ink-rising-uc-s-12-year-athletic-deficit-rises-to-a-quarter-of-a/article_3d841df6-7e92-11ea-9261-2f63f21e7ef7.html?fbclid=IwAR2uvIh5fdcrXl2dEjmmYkn60gzsxuFuLtAQ4COE9014ybZIOBrDgoKjnzM.)

Imagine what else could have been done with that amount of money.

At many of the public universities in Ohio, faculty have—for years—been strongly discouraged from using photocopiers for classroom handouts.

Undoubtedly, no sector of American life is going to escape the fiscal impact of the Coronavirus pandemic, and that impact will certainly be felt in higher education, where decades of increasing spending on everything and anything but instruction have already pared instructional spending very close to the bone.

So the question is whether, in a time of singular crisis, instruction will be continue to be sacrificed to things that our administrations and Boards insist are more important than instruction—even though, at almost all of our institutions, the only thing that produces net revenue is instruction.

Whatever the benefits of intercollegiate athletics are—and no one is denying that there are benefits—we need to ask simply whether they more important than the educations of the people who are very shortly going to be in the forefront of solving not only the innumerable medical, economic, and social issues that have been created by this pandemic but also the many other issues that have been largely ignored for at least a generation.

The same basic question can be asked about all of the other things that have become revenue sinks at the expense of instruction. At a moment in which it is all too easy to indulge in irrationality, the costs of such self-indulgence will be not only significant but also very long-lasting—if not permanently crippling.

It’s time for our administrations and Boards to demonstrate that they do actually value higher education and the core missions of the institutions that they have been entrusted to lead. If they don’t, then they should never have accepted the positions to begin with, and our governors should find people to replace them—administrators and trustees who recognize that we no longer have the luxury of pretending that there is money for everything, if only more savings can be squeezed from instruction.