Report shows big gap in athletic versus academic spend

Public universities in America’s six most powerful National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) conferences surpassed $100,00 per player in median annual athletic spending in 2010, a new study has found – six to 12 times the amount those colleges spent per student on academics, writes Brad Wolverton for The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The disparity, highlighted in a report released last Wednesday by the Delta Cost Project, an arm of the non-partisan American Institutes for Research, occurred as colleges pared back academic programmes amid continued cuts in state higher education budgets. Those economic pressures are likely to force many NCAA institutions to make tough choices in the coming years between sports and academics – or to put more pressure on students to foot a larger share of the athletic department’s bill.
Full report on The Chronicle of Higher Education site