WASHINGTON — Three area universities charge their students some of the highest athletic fees among public schools in the wealthiest, most competitive sports conferences, according to data compiled by The Washington Post.
The Post analyzed fees and athletic department revenue for 52 schools in the five wealthiest conferences, which include the Atlantic Coast Conference, Pacific 12, Southeastern Conference, Big 12 and the Big Ten. Students at the 10 schools that took in the most money paid a combined $80 million in athletic fees last year.
University of Virginia students shelled out the most of any the schools: $13.2 million in total, according to the Post’s analysis.
That’s almost 19 percent of the athletic department’s total revenue for the year. But it still falls within a new state-mandated cap on athletic fees set to take effect next summer. The university’s annual athletic fee of $657 per student has remained unchanged since 2010.
The fee at the University of Maryland, now in its second year in the football powerhouse Big Ten Conference, generated the second highest amount of revenue and Virginia Tech’s generated the fifth highest amount of revenue for collegiate athletics.
Various factors affect how schools set those athletic fees. Pressure to stay competitive, media revenue, the number of sports offered, alumni support and even state laws and policies can dictate how much students are asked to chip in.
A spokesman for Virginia’s athletic department declined to make the athletic director available for comment.
University of Maryland students each paid $406 per year to support collegiate sports, generating a combined $11.3 million. And Virginia Tech students each paid $288 annually, providing a total of $7.8 million for sports, according to the Post’s analysis.
“The fee is low, it’s been held low historically,” said Tracy Vosburgh, senior associate vice president for university relations at Virginia Tech.
Virginia Tech’s fee is roughly 2 percent of what a student pays to attend the Blacksburg campus and it’s one of the lowest athletic fees of all the public universities in the state, Vosburgh said.
Students also have access to free tickets to football and basketballs games, she said.
“It is a campus that has a spirit and it does attend and enjoy its athletic events,” Vosburgh said. “It is a very important part of the experience you get when you are a member of the Virginia Tech community.”
At Maryland, no tuition dollars go to support the athletic department, which is self-sufficient and sends at least $500,000 back to the university annually, said Brian Ullmann, associate vice president of marketing and communications.
A student advisory group sets and approves all of the fees students are charged including the athletic fee, which covers the cost of admission to games and sporting events, Ullmann said.
Tuition at College Park is the lowest in the Big Ten and the fees students pay to attend there are among the lowest in the state, he said.
It’s too soon to say how revenue from the Big Ten could affect those fees in the future, Ullmann said.
Maryland won’t receive its full share of conference revenue until 2021.
The university forfeited $31.4 million to leave the ACC, which as a basketball-centered conference doesn’t make as much money as the Big Ten’s dominant football programs. It will also pay $2.6 million to fired football coach Randy Edsall; the school introduced a new coach Thursday.
Maryland’s athletic department said that the school’s sports fee was last increased in the 2012-2013 school year from $403.88.
Although there is a role for sports on college campus and a fee to support student athletes, the fast rate of athletic fee increases at schools across the country concerns Amy Perko, executive director of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics.
Rising levels of institutional support, which includes money from the student-paid fees, is not sustainable and spending needs to be moderated to ensure the long-term viability of college sports, Perko said.
According to the commission, institutional support for athletics at Maryland almost doubled between 2005 and 2013.
At Virginia, that institutional support jumped 32 percent but decreased 14 percent at Virginia Tech during the same time period.
Neither Virginia or Virginia Tech are allowed to spend tuition dollars on athletics. That policy forces schools to rely more heavily on fees or revenue from ticket sales and alumni donations, said Del. Kirk Cox, a long-serving member of the House Appropriations Committee.
“Students still have to pay that no matter what bucket it’s coming out of,” Cox said of the cost to support athletics.
Cox, who is also the House majority leader, authored the new law that will cap the rate at which Virginia’s public universities rely on athletic fees.
The law sets the caps for the two flagship schools of Virginia Tech and Virginia at 20 percent, and sets higher thresholds for smaller schools that generally have less or little access to media revenue. The law also requires schools to be more transparent about the fees students pay and requires schools to seek legislative approval before moving to larger conferences or adding a major sport like football, he said.
A state-sponsored study found that on average 12 percent of the tuition and fees students were paying were going toward athletics at the 15 public universities in Virginia.
“I felt like that was really high and was really, obviously, making college less affordable,” Cox said.
John Cheslock, who studies how universities and college sports are funded, says the cost of athletics contributes to the rising price of a higher education but is not the primary driver.
“Tuition and fees, to a student, they still cost the same amount of money. A dollar is a dollar,” said John Cheslock, the director for the Center for the Study of Higher Education at Penn State University.
A separate fee for athletics is considered a more transparent way to pay for collegiate sports rather than siphoning away general tuition dollars. All three schools detail the fees students are required to pay on their websites.
Some schools use general tuition dollars to support sports and others have access to TV broadcast revenues and the deep pockets of alumni and donors — all of which can decrease the separate athletic fee students are mandated to pay.
But media revenue could be the trump card.
The ACC doesn’t generate as much money from media contracts to broadcast games as other conferences, said John Cheslock, the director for the Center for the Study of Higher Education at Penn State University.
The Big Ten, for example, runs its own cable channel, which generates enough revenue that schools in the conference can spend even more money on sports without asking students to contribute more. That puts pressure on competing schools to also increase spending, even if they don’t have the outside resources to do it, Cheslock said.
For Maryland, moving from the ACC to the Big 10 could have been one of the few options available and still allow the school to compete at a high level yet not lean so heavily on other sources, including even student fees, he said.
| University | Student fee income (millions) | Overall athletic revenue (millions) | Annual fee full-time undergrad | % of total athletic revenue |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Virginia | ||||
| Maryland | ||||
| Virginia Tech |
Source: Washington Post analysis of NCAA records
WTOP’s Amanda Iacone contributed to this report.
