An elite DI set of assistant coach salaries

[Mobius]

Most countries don't offer much in the way of student services or one organization serves students at many universities. Universities might not even have housing under their control. Food service is simple. Retention? Nope. Mental health services might be provided by the government, but quality will vary.

It's really like college life here in the 1950s.

[Wahoo Redux]

How many of these why the heck is this kid in college students, or their parents, even know how little most of the kids' teachers are being paid there, whilst coaches in an *extracurricular* activity, get easy street compensation, for doing something that adds nothing to education, and in most unis' cases, outliers like OSU notwithstanding, do not even make their athletic depts operate in the black?

And why is it that really no other country operates 'intercollegiate athletics'?

I don't disagree with you.  I am just calling it the way I see it.  As the kids say, "It is what it is."

I do think people care when they hear about adjunct teachers and the salaries of professors, but they do not care enough.  And enough people looooooooove their college sports teams that there is nothing to be done about it, at least not now.

The places that have to answer are schools like ours here in our suburban ghetto.  The teams lose.  The students don't go to the games.  We've had several embarrassing controversies involving coaches.  Our students each pay around $500 a semester to subsidize our teams.  During layoffs, program closures, and enrollment drops, the campus built a new indoor tennis court so the team could practice during the winter months.  We get students who would not be handed D1 scholarships, so the argument is, I believe, that they are paying tuition and boosting enrollment----which I could see, but the admin is tight lipped about the overall numbers and how much these sports actually balance the books.

We will just have to live with the system a little while longer, I think.  Shrug, wash your hands of it, and hit the books would be my advice.

[marshwiggle]

Face it, folks, for many but not all people, the football and basketball programs are the best part of college.

<interthreaduality>

Perhaps this is part of why there is so much questioning of the value of higher education in the US. For people who don't think that athletics are "the best part of college", it raises the very real question of "why bother" if that's not important to you?

(In other words, it's not just a matter of establishing the value of courses students have to take, but it's about establishing the value of the whole experience if what constitutes a major part of it to many people has no value whatsoever to a prospective student.)

[mamselle]

Just for balance, while I hated, and still do hate (we may only hate evil) the pernicious lie at the heart of football's glorification of violence as a strategy for moving forward, I did also get a very good education at OSU--perhaps because all of us with an actual interest in the life of the mind had learned to tune out the distractions so well.

I think that could have happened without all the idiocy going on--which skews but need not defensibly supply funding--but it's an experiment one can't run, since you can only live one life at a time.

M.

[research_prof]

A better question to ask is what revenue does faculty research generate for universities? If faculty research could generate as much revenue as college football, then we could make an argument that faculty should be paid the same as head coaches.

Researchers at my school generate a lot more revenue, even IDC recovery, than the football program. Nobody is making OSU-level athletic-staff money.

Then such faculty should go and "fight" with their department heads and deans to get generous salary increases and overloads. I did that where I am and I got a bit more money as overload (still not much). I tried to explain that this is not enough, they did not listen to me. That's (among other things) why I am moving to a much more prestigious university where they give me even more than this extra money as my regular 9-month salary. Faculty need to be vocal and "fight" with admins to get what is theirs. We cannot be sitting in our offices writing papers and grants and expect that the university will give us a raise because they are good people. Faculty have the option to move to different universities or do consulting for more money. At the end of the day, as I have said multiple times already, academia is a job like every other job and what we get paid is super important.

[Ruralguy]

Well, you certainly have to bring up the issue. It doesn't need to be adversarial.

[Parasaurolophus]

That's also what unions are for, so that the fight isn't conducted piecemeal by those who can exert personal leverage and leave everyone else hanging.

[artalot]

At my relatively small D1 uni we lose millions of dollars on football every year. Very few students or alumni attend the games - there is a much better, larger team nearby. A recent study found that  students and alumni don't care that we have football and it is not a draw in terms of recruitment - approximately 10% of students listed sports as one factor among many that they considered when choosing our school. We have multiple years of data demonstrating that D1 football does us absolutely no good financially or in terms of reputation and recruiting. We have football because a few of the trustees want football. That is all. It is maddening.

[dismalist]

At my relatively small D1 uni we lose millions of dollars on football every year. Very few students or alumni attend the games - there is a much better, larger team nearby. A recent study found that  students and alumni don't care that we have football and it is not a draw in terms of recruitment - approximately 10% of students listed sports as one factor among many that they considered when choosing our school. We have multiple years of data demonstrating that D1 football does us absolutely no good financially or in terms of reputation and recruiting. We have football because a few of the trustees want football. That is all. It is maddening.

Out of curiosity, Artalot, do you know if those trustees donate a lot of money to the school? In other words, are they paying for their entertainment or are they free riders?

[FishProf]

I was at BU when they dropped football.

No one really seemed to care all that much.

[Hibush]

The LA Times has an opinion about the cost-benefit calculation for one of their local teams.

Attendance, the scarlet "A" of the UCLA football program under coach Chip Kelly, continued a historic plunge Saturday during the Bruins' season opener.

Chip Kelley, with an annual salary of $4.3 million, is the highest paid employee in the entire UC system.

The expectations were also outlined by on fan (an alum):

Sam Andress, a longtime UCLA fan who attended his first game at the Rose Bowl as a 3-year-old in 1984, cited Kelly's lack of engagement with donors among the factors that made him give up his season tickets after Kelly's first season.

"Chip doesn't seem like he cares about fans and donors and alumni," Andress said before referencing a famously gruff coach who has won six national championships at Alabama. "So to me, it's like if you're not going to win at a Nick Saban level, then you don't get to not be interested in fans and donors that are paying for your program."

That quote tells you something about the "fans" that matter.

The national significance is also there:

To be fair, UCLA's falloff mirrors a nationwide decline in college football attendance. The average crowd among 130 Football Bowl Subdivision teams was 39,848 in 2021, the smallest since 1981.

[artalot]

Out of curiosity, Artalot, do you know if those trustees donate a lot of money to the school? In other words, are they paying for their entertainment or are they free riders?

There was apparently an understanding that these trustees and donors would cover the football shortfall. I remember that the idea of endowed scholarships for athletes was one of the proposals. If this didn't happen, my uni was supposed to revisit our D1 status. Let us simply say that my queries as to whether or not such donations have actually materialized have gone unanswered.

[research_prof]

That's also what unions are for, so that the fight isn't conducted piecemeal by those who can exert personal leverage and leave everyone else hanging.

Well.. guess what.. we are supposed to have a very strong union.. I asked them and they said what you want to be done cannot be done. All faculty need to be paid equally. In other words, unions are there to protect the bottom line (i.e., low performers) and try to equalize them with high performers.

[TreadingLife]

I was at BU when they dropped football.

No one really seemed to care all that much.

FishProf, were you a student (undergrad or grad) or faculty member then?

[FishProf]

Student - Grad.