Comment by korch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by korch | Hacker News Reader

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You can't talk about college costs and not also mention the enormous impact the college sports industry has had on transforming colleges from their academic role in society to that of being prestigious "mini-corporations."

Where is all the money going? Who's the top paid guy at university X? Oh, it's the football coach. Well why does he get to make $3 million a year while we just raised tuition 8% across the board, and cut financial aid by 20%? And that fat new sports arena which the university board of regents approved and just built for $100 million? Well, it doesn't count, because free market capitalism still applies to academic institutions—our true revenue source is selling and catering to sports fans. Professors, students, research, those are of course net losses, we just pay to keep them around in order to justify the existence of the sports team.

In a way, a University's brand, physical grounds, and costumed staff is a Disneyesque facade for the real money maker: football. Or perhaps I've just been reading too much into my Jean Baudrillard...

Football coaches are paid well because college football is a net money maker for the university--especially since they don't have to pay the athletes. If you want universities to be even more broke, by all means cut the athletic programs.

Is it a good thing that universities, who hold an implicitly benevolent, non-profit societal role, should also have such high profit margins on their "student"-players?

If the football team is bringing in the dough to fund a big chunk of the operating expenses, but aren't being fairly compensated, then the universities are exploiting those students for profit. What I don't see is how universities can use this same logic to justify using their sports teams to fund their academic operations.

This pattern sounds familiar, where else have I seen it, oh yeah: the rich should pay for the poor, because they are lucky enough to have more. (I actually believe this, and I'm just using parallel logic). A few student athletes will win the lottery moving into the pro's, so colleges "tax" athletes by not paying them, and substitute the incentive of "you might be the next Lebron." (Do s/Lebron/Google/ and doesn't it sounds eerily similar to VC startup logic?!) Then the rest of the student body benefits because the football team just paid the salary of the Poetry professor.

It might work this way, but I doubt it, although I'd love to see a study confirming how much money trickles back into colleges from their sports teams. We can just look at the larger macroscopic view for how efficient trickle down economics really is: of all the hundreds of billions given to the rich elites, how much of it trickles down to the poor? I bet the football team is keeping most of its profit, and in fact on average is a net loss to its attached college.

Maybe one day, instead of college football being run and supported by universities, people will take courses at football teams.

Speaking of which, I want my CostCo law degree.

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