Today CCAP is releasing
Funding the Arms Race: A Case Study of Student Athletic Fees, co-authored by Matthew Denhart and David Ridpath. Surveying roughly 1,000 students at Ohio University, a fairly typical mid-sized state university, Denhart and Ridpath find that intercollegiate athletics (ICA) is the largest recipient of general fee revenues, despite having low support among students. Other results include findings that:
- Over 70 percent of students favored ICA receiving modest to little general fee support, instead of being the most important use of those funds;
- Over 78 percent of students regarded ICA as an "unimportant" or "extremely unimportant" factor in deciding to enroll at Ohio University;
- 63 percent of respondents favor reducing the fee devoted to ICA, while 18 percent favor leaving it the same. Fewer than 10 percent of students favored a healthy ($30+ a year) increase in the fee to maintain ICA's current status;
- This study largely corroborates the results of a similar survey conducted by Katherine Ott at the University of Toledo in 2009.
Urging more transparency in the reporting of athletic fees, Denhart and Ridpath also call for additional research to be completed at other institutions to examine this issue on a broader, national scale.
1 comment:
I'd be willing to bet that attachment to sports has a lot to do with what school you look at. For example, here you looked at Ohio University, which is, no offense, not a big sports school.
At UNC-Chapel Hill, my alma mater, I'd be willing to bet the numbers are significantly higher. And even at Chapel Hill most of the students are fairly nerdy. You might even find the reverse of these opinions at a place like Alabama or Arkansas.
I'd be curious to see what a more comprehensive survey would reveal. Maybe OU really is representative.
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