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Cardinal News
Serving Southwest and Southside Virginia
I am a huge sports fan who this past week watched both the Old Dominion University men and women play basketball. Earlier in life, I attended at least one St. Louis Cardinal baseball game 49 years in a row. I note these things because I do not want to be interpreted as just another academic who is anti-intercollegiate athletics.
But being a fan has not blinded me to what has been going on in intercollegiate athletics in the United States. Increasingly, intercollegiate athletics are driven by financial rather than academic considerations. A high school lineman in Texas signed a $5+ million deal with Texas Tech, and the University of Texas Austin’s now famous quarterback (Arch Manning) has an agreement with that university that is reputed to be worth $6 million to him. LSU may owe $47 million to the head football coach it just fired, while Texas A&M’s 2023 cashiering of its head coach reportedly may cost that institution as much as $76 million.
Within Virginia, James Madison University this year is assessing each of its full-time undergraduates a mandatory athletic fee that exceeds $3,000 (this translates to about $100 per credit hour!). Old Dominion University’s version of this fee costs its undergraduates $2,127 annually, while William and Mary’s fee is $2,401. For these and similar data, see the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia’s 2025-26 Tuition and Fees Report.
Virginia Tech recently received considerable publicity when its board of visitors adopted a plan that will see Tech plug almost a quarter of a million dollars into its intercollegiate athletics programs over four years. One member of Tech’s board voted against this proposal.
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Is there any evidence that students benefit from such expenditures? For example, can we point to benefits realized by Longwood University undergraduate students who this academic year must pay a mandatory $3,083 athletics fee? Longwood does not field a football team, so the focus on that campus is on its men’s and women’s basketball teams. The NCAA reported an average attendance of 2,086 fans at Longwood home men’s games in 2024-25, while the Longwood women basketballers averaged 1,115 fans at their home contests. Longwood’s headcount enrollment exceeds 4,000, and some in attendance at its games are not students. Ticket sales for all Longwood athletic events totaled a bit more than $115,000 in 2024, a paltry sum when compared to the $8.18 million that the University earned from its mandatory athletic fee. (These financial data come from the Knight-Newhouse database on intercollegiate athletics (Custom Reports | College Athletics Database.)
James Madison and Old Dominion, both of whom are relatively recent entrants into the “big-time” Football Bowl Division (FBS) category, earn much more from their mandatory student athletic fees than other Virginia institutions. In FY 2024, Knight-Newhouse reports that JMU garnered $55.53 million from its fee, while ODU earned $32.39 million. Those are not trivial sums and are among the very highest in the nation. No wonder both institutions field winning football teams.
These fees exist despite the reality that on most campuses, students vote with their feet, and data show that most students on most campuses choose not to attend any of their institutions’ athletic events. Nevertheless, they are forced to pay for those events anyway.
Well, more than 90% of all intercollegiate athletic programs lose money and therefore must be subsidized, and often this occurs outside of the public eye. Interested readers should go to the Knight-Newhouse database on intercollegiate athletics (Custom Reports | College Athletics Database) to find relevant data on a particular institution’s athletics financing. This report, for example, reveals that Longwood’s athletic programs received $6.69 million in “institutional/government support” in addition to the student fee revenue. I can be convinced otherwise, but this $6.69 million appears to be a subsidy to those programs. However, Longwood isn’t the Lone Ranger here. Similar subsidization exists on nearly every Virginia campus — George Mason University’s comparable support number was $5.8 million, while Virginia Commonwealth University’s was $6.72 million.
Do athletic programs make degrees more valuable and this justifies fees and subsidies? Unfortunately, the answer is no. I am a co-author of a recently published book, “The Economic Impact of Intercollegiate Athletics on Former Students: Unfulfilled Promises” (Palgrave MacMillan). In this book, we examined 699 colleges over the period 2004-2022 and found no evidence that the typical institution’s students realize any economic benefits from their alma mater’s athletic programs after they graduate. Indeed, for the typical student, the evidence tells us that attending college athletic events is analogous to a person drinking a can of diet cola. The cola may taste good and hit the spot, but once consumed, it has no further impact on the drinker. Here today, gone tomorrow. But note this — students can freely choose not to buy a can of diet cola; however, they do not enjoy a similar choice with respect to how their campus’s intercollegiate athletic programs are funded.
The commonwealth of Virginia is notable for the quality of the higher education provided on its campuses, public and independent. But one need not be Bob Dylan to recognize that the times are changing. Given current trends, it is time for members of governing boards, governors, legislators, donors, parents, students and the media to ask how and where expensive intercollegiate athletics programs will maintain or improve Virginia’s higher education position in the future. Governor-elect Abigail Spanberger should not ignore this need.
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James Koch is president emeritus of Old Dominion University.
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James Koch is President Emeritus of Old Dominion University. More by James Koch 
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