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Comment by jerrya | Hacker News Reader

> The highly successful model of using tax and tuition dollars to subsidize and plant the seeds for thriving local economies is getting hit from all directions at once.

Maybe schools can pay competitive wages to their researchers while state schools focus admissions on state students?

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That would mean a decline in revenues and an increase in costs. Where does the money come from?

Get rid of the excessive high paid administrators.

Football coaches have a rather large salary.

For many schools, football subsidizes all sports, even after paying the coaches and staff. And for a lot of schools, football pays for scholastics. You'd be hard pressed to find a school that pays a coach out of line financially.

I keep reading these same talking points without any data to support it. Can you provide any details on “many schools” or “a lot of schools”?

My alma mater, Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, pays their coach $533k/year. That is half-a-million dollars for a mid-tier team in a mid-tier conference. They also built a $13 million indoor sports practice facility a few years ago. https://miamiredhawks.com/sports/2018/6/7/facilities-indoor-...

Miami of Ohio isn't a football school as you know, although it seems they want to try and capture more of the football pie. The school has 36M in annual sports revenue [1], a good chunk of that football. From a source that had 28M in total sports revenue, it stated over 6M in football [2]

As the coach of a multi-million dollar business, 533k is justified. Especially since the talent is currently not compensated. If you want to compete you have to spend a decent amount. You're right that Miami of Ohio is mid-tier but the 533k is a mid-tier salary these days (#112 in rankings). There are 6 other MAC schools with higher coach salaries than your school. [2]

Also, from your own article "The 91,000-square-foot facility was built completely with donor contributions and is used by student-athletes, intramural and club sports participants and youth athletic tournaments."

Donor contributions.... And used by everyone for various sports including youth... So I'm not sure why you are so upset.

Aside from that - there are 108 schools with athletic revenue of 30+M. [1]

And, "The average college football team makes more money than the next 35 college sports combined" [3].

[1] https://sports.usatoday.com/ncaa/finances/

[2] https://sports.usatoday.com/ncaa/salaries/

[3] https://www.businessinsider.com/college-sports-football-reve...

[4] https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/miami-university-oxf...

What percentage of schools is this true for? There are only a few dozen schools that have a big time football program.

In general, "[f]ootball coaches have a rather large salary" correlates with "schools that have a big time football program".

But these are the extreme outliers. Here is a list of schools in Tennessee as an example [0]. How many of them have a big time football program? Maybe 4 or 5 out of the 53 schools?

[0] - https://www.universityreview.org/tennessee-colleges/

In many schools, football programs (and usually also basketball and baseball) are "revenue" programs that contribute more to the school than they cost.

Additionally, many states require that coaching salaries above a certain threshold not be paid out of tuition dollars, so boosters are actually funding the salaries of many coaches at the FBS (fka Div I-A) level.

Having boosters cover the employment costs of public employees creates it’s own set of potential problems.

Taxpayers are paying for the schools, the schools do contribute to the economy in a big way, but are also massive externalities on the communities. Perhaps by scaling back a big on admin and other costs the people will get a better bang for their buck -- as well as having their own kids gain the instruction.

I am not sure why state schools exist if not to teach the state students, esp. if taxpayers have to fund them. Is it strictly a jobs program then, to feed local profs, staff, restaurants and so therefore they have a duty to the taxpayer to just bring in the most income?

Part of the reason tuition costs more is because the Baby Boomers and Generation X decided they didn't want to pay as much in taxes as their parents did, and so public education got less funding--in some places, as much as 90% less funding compared to 30 years ago.

For example, in the 1970s, the state of CA covered more than 90% of the UC system budget. In 2020, CA only covered around 10% of the UC budget.

Sorry, but that is not even close to the truth. The state covered only 32% of the UC system budget in 1974 when 18% of the state budget went to higher education, and it covers 16% of the UC budget now but the state spends 12% of its total budget on higher education. What changed? Proposition 98, which mandated that community colleges get a bigger piece of the allocated higher education funds -- they now receive 58% of the total (22% UC and 20% CSU).

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