Do Students Benefit from College Athletics?
James V. Koch, a former university president, prolific writer about college governance, and huge college sports fan, chats with Jim Bacon about the seismic changes in the college sports landscape. In his new book, “The Economic Impact of Intercollegiate Athletics on Former Students,” Koch explores the pros and cons of college athletics for students and concludes that they are a net negative for graduates as measured by a variety of economic outcomes.
Lightly edited transcript
Jim Bacon: Hello, everyone. I’m Jim Bacon, and this is the Oinkonomics Podcast.
No doubt, some of you have surmised that oinkonomics is a wordplay on my name — Bacon, pigs, oink — and oiko, the Greek word for economics. Although I’m a historian by academic training and a journalist by profession, I’m a great admirer of the economist’s way of thinking. Such economic concepts as alternate opportunity cost, return on investment, and net present value are indispensable for the rational analysis of public policy issues. Today, for the first time on this podcast, I’m actually interviewing a real live economist — Dr. James V. Koch.
Virginia listeners may recall Jim Koch from his 11-year tenure as president of Old Dominion University. Since retiring from that post in 2001, he has spent the past 24 years as president emeritus doing pretty much what he pleases, which has meant focusing on the economics and governance of higher education in the United States. From his time at ODU, and previously as president of the University of Montana, he has a deep well of hands-on experience to draw from.
In his latest endeavor, Koch is co-author with Richard J. Cebula and Robert N. Finili of “The Economic Impact of Intercollegiate Athletics on Former Students.” The book touches upon many issues of interest to anyone concerned about higher education in America today, and we’ll get into some of those questions in the interview. The central question of the book is what impact does athletics have on students’ financial well-being after they graduate?
As Virginia universities grapple with new rules governing college athletics, effectively turning football and basketball programs into professional farm teams for major league franchises, governing boards at some institutions will have to cough up tens of millions of dollars to pay their athletes. Where will that money come from? And how much of the cost will be passed on to students as athletic fees, And what is the payoff, if any, for the students?
Jim, welcome to the Oinkonomics podcast. Bring us up to speed on how big-time college athletics is changing, and the kind of choices boards of visitors here in Virginia and elsewhere are faced with.
James V. Koch: Well, first of all, let me thank you, Jim, for the opportunity to interact with your viewers and listeners, a group of people who are pretty sharp, and I anticipate some good questions and interaction from them as time goes on.
You have to place all this intercollegiate athletics stuff in context.
Higher education itself has been an uproar now and, yes, the things that Donald Trump is doing, like at the University of Virginia and so forth, are getting lots of publicity. But many people are not aware that there are two million fewer college students in the United States now than there were ten years ago. So higher education itself is in, at the very least, a recession, almost a depression.
In the last 2 years, 50 small, mostly liberal arts institutions have gone out of business. And on top of this, in front of us is an enrollment cliff. An absolute decline in the number of high school graduates is going to occur in 45 out of the 50 states over the next roughly 10 years. So, not only is enrollment going down, but times are really going to get tough, and people are going to start really competing for students as a matter of survival.
The way things happen in economics and in politics, I don’t really expect any public institutions to go under. Maybe some will merge, as they have in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. But what we will see is institutions getting smaller and beginning to undercut each other and lowering their admission standards, perhaps lowering their exit standards as well.
This is all background for what’s happening in intercollegiate athletics where several momentous court decisions have really changed things. Let me mention them briefly, and we can come back to them. About 10 years ago, Ed O’Bannon, who was a basketball player at UCLA and then played professionally, sued the NCAA and said, look, you’re using my image. You’re televising games and I don’t get anything from that. Well, Ed O’Bannon won his case, the court agreed with him. He didn’t get anything out of it, because he was already a pro, but that was one of the first major legal chinks in the armor of the NCAA, because here’s a court saying, hey, you’re not treating these athletes the way you should.
Then in 2021 the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in with a decision that essentially said to the NCAA, you’re violating the Sherman Act, you’re violating antitrust law. And Justice Kavanaugh, a noted conservative on the court, took the NCAA to task and said, if you were doing this sort of thing in any other industry, computers, or automobiles, or Coca-Cola’s, it would clearly be illegal, and you’ve been doing all this stuff all the time. You’re fixing prices, you’re fixing output, you’re colluding, you’re conspiring, all of this is illegal.
That’s background for the case that’s getting the most attention, which is House versus NCAA, which was just decided this last June. And House, in brief, said to the people in the NCAA and at the universities, you’re doing things that are illegal in order to arrange a solution. The solution isn’t particularly elegant in very many ways, but one of the things it did do is the NCAA pleaded guilty and agreed to pay a very large sum of money. And the penalty payments are going now to the athletes who competed in the last decade.
If you competed, let’s say, going back to, like, Ed O’Bannon’s days, you’re now eligible to receive a payment. But the House decision also said, look, you can now pay athletes. So now it is possible to have a university directly pay an athlete a sum of money, $20.5 million a year. The court said, you can use that to directly pay athletes. Universities could decide whether they wanted to, quote, opt in or opt out of that. Opt-in meant, I’m going to do that, and we’re going to go full blast at this. That $20.5 million will probably increase over time. But anyway, that’s another source of payment for athletes.
None of this, however, is connected to NIL. That’s name, image, likeness.
Universities now, as a result of this court decision, can do new agreements with athletes, which is to say, they can pay them for using their name, using their likeness, publishing their games. Doing those kinds of things, and those new agreements are almost unlimited in amount that can be granted. I’ve seen new agreements, for example, for Arch Manning, the Texas quarterback, more than $6 million. A softball pitcher left Stanford and went to Texas Tech for a million dollars. I could go on and on, but maybe the most amazing one to me was a high school lineman signing with Texas Tech for about $5 million spread over four years.
So, there’s all this money out there. And the court set up a mechanism for deciding whether or not these payments were, quote, reasonable. There’s a commission composed of individuals coming from the Big Five, the Power Five conferences, who will decide whether or not these new agreements are reasonable.
I’m an economist, so you’ll forgive me for saying, what’s reasonable? We’re accustomed to dealing with market prices, and what you might think is reasonable isn’t something I think is reasonable, so I can anticipate that there will be some significant disagreements there. If that commission ever turns somebody down, then the person who gets turned down clearly has a basis for an antitrust suit. You know, lots of people get turned down. One could see a class action there.
Now, one could also anticipate probably a class action relating to Title IX. Title IX would seem to address situations such as these, where men are getting much larger payments than women. So, there are all these things floating out there.
Before we move on to other topics, the NCAA is trying to deal with all this. It sees all these potential legal problems and hurdles, so it has developed something called the SCORE Act. The SCORE Act, in essence, you won’t be violating antitrust law because we’re going to give you an out. Then also, it would relieve them of any responsibility on Title IX, so that they could go ahead and do things that are unequal relative to men and women. The SCORE Act is in the Congress right now. The NCAA is lobbying hard in favor of it, as are some institutions, because if you’re a big-time institution, what you would like to do is maybe have a lid on the amount that coaches can be paid. Believe it or not, there are nine college coaches in the United States now — football coaches — who are earning more than $10 million a year. I can tell you, as a college president, I did not earn that kind of money.
Anyway, all of this stuff is out there. And it is fair to say that the future of intercollegiate athletics is in the hands of the courts and the Congress. And people such as you and I are bystanders in this. We’re looking at this, and we don’t have any control over it.
Bacon: One thing it seems that we can count on is it’s going to cost colleges hundreds of millions of dollars nationally. And the question is going to be where’s the money coming from? Traditionally, one source of the money was the students themselves: athletic fees, or sometimes athletic fees rolled into student fees. Where do you think the money’s going to come from? Students most likely. Depending upon the university, are they likely be facing larger fees?
Koch: Yes, but they won’t necessarily know it, because some of these subsidies are out of public view. If you think about the major sources of revenue for college athletic programs, of course, they’re ticket sales. It’s not commonly recognized that the average attendance for Division I FPS football games actually declined nearly every year over the last decade. Yes, we watch Ohio State and Michigan, there are 100,000 people there, but that’s not generally the case.
There’s a little footnote here, if you’re a student or a fan, you can stay home and watch it on ESPN2 or ESPN+, and you can quaff an ale. You can smoke, you can do all kinds of things with your friends that you can’t do at the game. So, lots of students and lots of fans, apparently, are staying home, and they may watch the game over television, but they’re not going to attend, so ticket sales in general have not been a great source of revenue.
Gifts are another major source of revenue, and of course, if you’re the University of Oregon, you’re getting money from the shoe people out there. If you’re in Texas, you’re getting money from oilmen and so forth. Those are rich sources, but they’re not generally available. So, gifts aren’t the solution for colleges and universities.
Student fees are another source, and of course, Virginia stands out among the states in the sense that we have the largest student fees supporting athletics of any state in the union, and we’ve got lots of them. One that stands out the most, of course, is VMI, but they’re a special case. They have a fee for athletics of more than $4,000 a year. But, beyond that, Longwood University has a fee of about $3,100, James Madison about $3,000, Dominion, about $2,200, so there are lots of large fees out there.
UVA and Tech are not large fee institutions, neither are George Mason and Virginia Commonwealth. These are, like, $700 or $800. Which is not an inconsiderable sum. Those [latter] two institutions don’t have football teams, so they don’t have to pay for that. Football is the thing that costs money. It’s the thing that sucks up money from nearly any source. I said before that students are subsidizing what’s going on, but they may not know it. It won’t necessarily be in the form of a student fee. It will simply be a transfer that occurs inside the central administration to the athletic program. There are all sorts of clever ways to do this. You take care of their electric bill, you take care of house cleaning, you give them free computer services. There are almost endless ways that you can find a way to subsidize a program.
Student fees are a more honest way, frankly, of putting this forward. In the case of James Madison, they’re having very good teams now, but that’s because they’re charging people about $100 a credit hour. For intercollegiate athletics, that’s astonishing if you think about it.
The General Assembly took action a couple of years ago to put lids on these. Gradually, James Madison will have to do what Old Dominion did and decrease the size of that fee and find other sources of revenue. And those other sources of revenue may be the central administration. In my book we’ve got lots of examples of these subsidies going on, and generally they are clothed in rather mundane language that will say, “This is undesignated.” It’s not men or women, it’s undesignated, or it’s unallocated revenue. If you look at the lower half of the FBS, the lower half of the power institutions, those institutions generally are getting the biggest subsidies from the central administration.
But that’s not always so. University of Arizona’s been getting $30 or $40 million a year the last years, and UCLA, according to the Los Angeles Times, is getting about the same amount. A little footnote on UCLA: the Los Angeles Times had a lot of fun sending drones over the top of the Rose Bowl to watch and see how many fans are actually attending UCLA games. UCLA would report an attendance of 40,000. And then the Los Angeles Times determined that maybe there were only 28,000 there. There was a huge difference between announced attendances and who was actually there.
It’s true that there are some benefits to be had from fielding a successful athletic program, and probably one could look at a Duke, for example, and say, gee, that’s pretty good publicity for them. Maybe more students want to go there, maybe they took in more gifts. The problem is there isn’t much evidence of that. Economists are quantitative people, we like numbers. We’ve looked pretty carefully at whether or not there is an admissions payoff for a good team. Virginians remember both George Mason and VCU going to the Final Four. Both of those institutions realized a little bit of an admissions upsurge in terms of applications that soon went away. Friends and students have short memories.
That kind of benefit can be there, and I might add, since I spent time at the University of Montana, a very successful program, and they’re in the playoffs now. They get 26,000 or 27,000 fans at every one of their games, and they play eight home games, so that turns out to be a big economic engine for the community. Talk to members of the business community in Missoula, Montana. They would say, gee, the Grizzlies are wonderful. They bring all these people to town, they spend money, they stay several days, and so forth, and all of that is good for business. And it’s a real stimulus. So, there is that as well.
And then there’s a third benefit that I would mention. Let’s say in Blacksburg, people may argue politically about all kinds of things. There’s something that is unifying about intercollegiate athletics that can make people feel better about what’s going on and feel better about talking to people in the next seat next to them and the like. So, I think there are some benefits there.
But having said all that, my recent book is all about are there any income benefits that flow to students after they’ve paid for these things? And there are none. We looked at five different measures of economic welfare, such as income, whether you pay your debts on time, whether you have upward economic mobility, and in all five of these things, there’s no connection between the sports teams and any of those economic measures. So, our conclusion was that athletics are a consensus good. It’s like drinking a diet cola. It hits the spot at the time, but once you’ve drunk it, it is just gone, completely. Intercollegiate athletics are pretty much like that.
I would make simply one final point. If you’re in collegiate athletics, a winning team is good for you. What about a bad team? This is always ignored in the analyses of intercollegiate athletics by those who are supporters. If your team loses, does that cause people to apply less often, to give fewer gifts? There’s this other side of the coin that supporters never seem to like to address.
Bacon: Let’s explore the arguments in favor of the athletic programs just a bit. You laid out a number of the supposed benefits, but the key one that you focus on in your book is that you get this halo effect around the school, and people are all excited, and you get prestige and national attention, and that does help when it comes to admissions. That also allegedly helps when graduates go out and look for jobs. Maybe George Mason and VCU, after their basketball teams made the Final Four were held in higher regard in the marketplace. Can you explore that a little bit more, and describe the data that addresses that?
Koch: Well, I don’t doubt, Jim, that that is possible for one or two institutions. It’s simply not generally true. And one of the reasons this is not generally true is that half the teams have to lose. So, there are about 50% of the teams out there where that could possibly be true. I’ll give you a specific example. You remember Doug Flutie, a college quarterback and that Hail Mary pass? That did give Boston College an upward surge in applications. The applications didn’t necessarily come from really strong students uniformly but they got more applications. But then after a couple of years, that died away.
I don’t doubt that some of these things are there. But they tend to be exaggerated. And if you get down to, is this something I should pay $100 a credit hour for, I’d have to say as a student, no.
Bacon: Balanced against the alleged benefits of the athletic programs are some arguments that they are actually detrimental, and the most tangible of those is the fact that students have to pay those student fees. Speaking from my own personal experience, or rather that of my son, who’s a graduate student now at VCU. He’s been to one basketball game, he told us. He’s just not really interested in sports, and so whatever the amount is that he pays in his athletic fees, it’s largely wasted. I mean, for him, it’s wasted.
Clearly there seems to be a cost, particularly to those students who don’t avail themselves of the athletic programs. And then the other one is, and we’ll get to in a second, is the proposition of an academic named Murray Sperber, who talked about the beer and circus phenomenon in which athletics is associated with excess drinking and revelry and God knows what proceeds downstream from that. But let’s talk for a second about the athletic fees. One of the things that you mentioned was interesting, kind of counterintuitive, that some of the bigger schools with more prestigious athletic programs actually have lower fees, and that’s a function of them having more students than some of the smaller schools. What are the drivers there?
Koch: In general, the Power Five institutions – the better ones among them — have the ability to raise money other ways. They don’t need to tax their students. Institutions that need to tax their students are the ones whose programs are marginal in terms of national prominence. I would certainly include Old Dominion, George Mason, James Madison and VCU in that category. Athletically, that’s the way it is. No particular hit on them otherwise. It’s just factually the way things are.
The Old Dominion Stadium only seats about 20,000. You can’t make money if that’s all the seats you can sell, no matter how good you are. And, yeah, Old Dominion put a quarterback into the NFL, Taylor Heineke, ten years ago. Basically, because of NIL, [the good players] leave. This year, ODU is very successful, going to a bowl game, and it seems likely that [quarterback Colton Joseph] is going to receive some pretty lucrative bids from more well-heeled institutions, and the likelihood of his being in Norfolk next year is not very high.
I’d like to come back to one additional point. Not only is there no financial benefit to students after they [graduate] but we found evidence that at places that have a reputation as a football factory, their incomes are actually lower. Yes, there might be this case where somebody says, I really respect Tech, so I’m gonna give guys from Tech an interview. The reverse also seems to be true. Institutions — I won’t name, but you can guess them, they’re mostly in the SEC – those people, statistically, earn less than counterparts with the same credentials.
We don’t make a big thing out of that, because we don’t have a huge sample of institutions, but it does seem as if some employers assume that if you’re graduating from institution X, maybe you’re not so smart, or maybe you didn’t spend so much time at your studies.
That has been accentuated now by artificial intelligence. As a professor now, it is very difficult for me to examine students, to give them a test if they’re not in front of me. Now many courses, of course, are distributed. At Old Dominion, you could have a student on an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean. How do you test a person like that and know that it’s really their work? How do you assign a term paper, and know that it’s somebody’s work? I think employers, increasingly, are going to look at college diplomas for lots of institutions, maybe not all, and say, I’m not sure this person knows anything. I need to see them in person in an internship or I have to have them take certain exams – like accounting, that would be an obvious one. You take a CPA exam. There will be more exams like that. That applies then also to students who come out of athletics, looking at them and saying, do they really know anything, or did they just attend games and have a good time?
Bacon: That’s a really interesting question. It has ramifications way beyond the impact of athletic programs, so maybe we can get back to that someday.
Tell us a little bit about Murray Sperber, and his arguments about the beer and circus phenomenon.
Koch: Well, Murray Sperber, was an English professor at Indiana University. I’ve written half a dozen books all of which, for the most part focus on intercollegiate athletics and things that he doesn’t like, and that includes athletics, which is most everything. He thinks that colleges have sold their inheritance, sold their lives, their honor, to intercollegiate athletics, and that intercollegiate athletics, as it’s done today, simply does not belong on an American campus. They’re destructive to academic values, drag people out of class.
Murray Sperber, for example, looks at things like Thursday night drinking. You may not be aware of this, or perhaps you are, but weekends begin on Thursday now on campuses. You can go on a typical campus these days on a Friday, and there’s nobody there. That’s an exaggeration, but there aren’t very many people there, and you can find very few classes being taught. Now, I’m an old timer on this. I can remember as a college freshman, when things were crowded, having a course on Saturday morning. And there were 8 o’clocks on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Tuesday, Thursday, things like that. Well, all that’s gone by the boards. Students readily confess that their weekend begins on Thursday night, when they get to drink and carouse and do whatever they’re going to do.
Well, this is what Murray Sperber sees, perhaps overemphasizes. But he sees and thinks that these things are inconsistent. Of course, he’s not the only one to think or say that. But he said it more vociferously on a campus that had Bobby Knight. Bobby Knight was a basketball coach – the main target in many ways, because he did all kinds of things, said things to presidents and people, and fans and so forth that these days you can’t get away with. He hit somebody, and he threw chairs across the floor, so he was a target, and Murray Sperber used him as a classic bad example.
Well, eventually, Bobby got fired. Murray Sperber literally got driven out of town, went to Canada. I think he’s still alive. What Murray did in his book, Jim, was to espouse his values and say, this is what I stand for, this is what universities ought to stand for. And he came forward with a boatload of anecdotes, stories, examples, saying, look at this, look at that. This shows or proves that X, Y, and Z are the case.
But for economists, I’ll have to say, anecdotes are not scientifically drawn out. They’re interesting but do they really prove the point? Do we really know that that’s true? Now, in our book, we have a sample of 800 colleges and universities spread over 20 years. We have a long sample involving lots of institutions, and we’re not simply looking at the Ohios and Michigans in the world. We’re also looking at the Randolph-Macons, and Carroll College, and small institutions that don’t pursue athletics at the same level. There’s quite a mixture of institutions there, and that’s why we have a little bit more confidence in our conclusions.
If you only look at 20 or 30 or 40 institutions, the big-timers, you’re probably going to get a different idea, a different context than you will if you’re also looking at what might be true at the University of Virginia’s campus at Wise. The academic world is pretty diverse, and one needs to take account of these other institutions in order to get an idea about what’s actually occurring.
Bacon: Yes, and your book emphasizes the fact that there’s an enormous amount of variability within higher education. A handful of football and basketball programs actually fully pay for themselves. Some cost money, but not as much as you might think, and others are huge money sinks. Did you see any patterns in terms of which are the money makers, and which are the money losers?
Koch: The money makers are few in number. Maybe only 2 or 3% of athletic programs nationally make money. So, everybody’s losing money. It’s simply a matter of how they get their subsidies, and where they’re going to come from. John Q. Public doesn’t seem to understand that all of these programs, for the most part, are subsidized, and the money’s got to come from somewhere. Eventually, it comes down to a president sitting in his office, deciding that he’s going to lend support one way or another.
Many, many times, the president does not announce that to campus. And you could look at a university’s budget and work very hard to try to figure out what flows of money are going from one place to another, and you can’t figure it out because it’s too complex and it’s too well hidden. They’re difficult to track. There are foundations, there are fan clubs, there are all these kinds of things going on now, and it’s nearly impossible for college presidents to keep track of all this. Especially so if they come out of a discipline like English or softer disciplines, they have trouble dealing with figures. I think you almost have to be an economist and a sports fan or an accountant perhaps to understand how these things are occurring. These things get hidden until they suddenly burst into view.
The University of Arizona is an excellent example. They were running a huge deficit for the university as a whole. I’m talking about something as large as $100 million a year. The president said that said he was surprised by that. Part of that was athletics. It was $30 or $40 million, apparently. All of this is in the newspapers and came out later. It was hidden for a long period of time as they went on.
And some of these institutions are going to even more expensive conferences. If you move, let’s say, to the SEC, or the Big 12, you’re not going to spend less, you’re going to spend more. And some of these institutions are difficult to track and understand what they’re doing. But even inside these Power 5 conferences, you have instances now where single institutions are dissatisfied with what they’re getting from the conference. Michigan and Ohio State now want more money. They don’t want the Big Ten to divide it up equally. They want a larger slice because their argument is, our TV ratings are much higher, we get much larger attendance, why should we give Northwestern the same amount that we get? This was played out last year in the ACC. Florida State and Clemson actually sued the ACC, sued their own conference. Eventually they came to an agreement, and so now, distribution will be skewed such that Florida State and Clemson are going to get more money.
Where’s all this headed? Well, I would not be surprised if the Power Five institutions dropped out of the NCAA and football and went their own way, so that they can control the money better. I don’t think they would necessarily do that in men’s and women’s basketball and other sports, although maybe. In football, it seems to me that they’re going to militate in favor of a break-off, and the NCAA, then, in some ways, is going to end up being more of a championship competition sponsor than a big-time economic player.
Bacon: Look, I’m a huge believer in capitalism and free enterprise and all that stuff, but this exists in a netherworld between the free markets and regulation and cartels, and the greed is just — I think personally, I betray my prejudice — it’s counterproductive. In the end, it’s a big a net negative for students.
As we kind of get near the end of this interview, without getting too deep in the weeds, explain to readers the major variables you use in your analysis. You didn’t just have one kind of post-graduate graduation metric for financial well-being. You had several. After you ran all your regression analysis, what did you find?
Koch: What we’re trying to explain is economic prosperity of graduates.
We’re looking at four or five different measures of income and paying debts and so forth. And then we’re trying to explain those quantitatively, statistically, by means of several groups of variables. What are variables that relate to the typical family circumstances? Of students at an institution, do the parents have lots of money? In other words, we’re looking at the individual characteristics of the students, such as our SAT scores. We’re looking at the characteristics, otherwise, of the institution in terms of its location. What’s the size of their endowment? We’re looking at institutional variables, then we’re looking at what I’ll call state and local variables, that is, is this a state that has a lot of money? What’s the unemployment rate? How is that related to what students earn and what happens? On top of all this, we’re looking at, of course, the institution’s academic reputation to see whether there’s a direct payoff there. Can you match up, for example, U.S. News and World-Report ratings with incomes once you’ve held constant these other kinds of things?
Long story short, the answer is no, you can’t. There’s virtually no connection other than the negative ones I’ve mentioned between between programs and what students later do in life.
Bacon: With everything so much in flux, it calls into question whether there should even be this kind of big money athletics in colleges at all. You go to Europe, and the Europeans find the American relationship between academic institutions and athletics to be very strange. Very few European universities have sports teams at all. Did your research cover what’s going on in Europe? Has the severing of athletics from academics made a difference in the outcomes to students there?
Koch: Well, in Europe, as you know, students don’t pay for athletics. It’s basically like a club sport in the United States. I look at the rugby team at Old Dominion University, and say, gee, these guys are out here, and some gals as well, because they just want to be there, they enjoy it. They go off and maybe corral together and have a good time, but they’re there because they want to be there. And the university supplies them with a small subsidy and gives them places to play, and so forth. But there are no scholarships, there are no formal hiring of coaches and so forth. They do all that on their own. So, the club model, I pine for. It isn’t one that is widely adopted.
That’s one that I think has much to commend it, and follows somewhat the the European model. I’d like to see us move in that direction, and I think, actually, some of that is likely to occur if the big-timers split off in football. Then the rest of the sports will sort of say, gee, do we really need to do this, or do we really need to do that?
On top of this, you have the enrollment cliff and all these things I was talking about before that are going to make life pretty tough financially for some colleges and universities, and so I would fully expect to see some institutions decide we’re moving down from Division I to Division II or III, or we’re moving to the NAIA, or we’re going to do something different that isn’t going to cost us as much money. I think some of that is virtually inevitable because, again, 50 institutions over the last two years have gone out of existence.
I was a consultant at Iowa Wesleyan, which was in the throes of almost closing — and they did close. There’s no more Iowa Wesleyan. Well, why is that? They’re a small, under-endowed institution in a rural location, not especially well known for any particular program, and there are lots of other institutions like that in Virginia. They’re not likely to be around 10 years from now, especially true if President Trump makes it much more difficult to obtain a federal student loan. And if you have to actually pay those back, that’s going to change life as well.
I would not be surprised to see players on teams who don’t have to be students anymore. And there’s a model for that. For example, in the theater department at Old Dominion there are individuals hired who are professionals. They will come down from Broadway or wherever, and they’ll spend a year or two, and they work with the students, and they appear in plays, and they do things that are similar to an athletic contest, except it’s a play or a performance. But they’re not students. They can take courses if they want to, but nobody cares whether they’re doing that or not. Well, I think that might be another way for institutions to go, where they hire certain people who are, quote, athletes, and they’re not necessarily students. And my contention would be, from my personal experience, some athletes now are not really students. And I have personal knowledge of that.
Bacon: Well, Jim, thanks so much for your time. I do have one last question. This is kind of a gotcha, I guess, but answer it however you will. Back when you were president, ODU had a basketball team, but not a football team. Now it has a football team. How’s that worked out?
Koch: Well, I don’t second-guess the actions of my successors. But I would observe that football is expensive, and football has drawn money away from other programs at Old Dominion. When I was president, the Lady Monarchs played for the national championship in, what, 1997? We’re not close to that anymore. The university won a couple of field hockey national championships, and the men played teams like Georgetown and Villanova, and actually beat them a third or a half the time. I can remember beating Virginia Tech 3 out of 4 in basketball. A weather vane on this will be the quarterback.
Bacon: Well, we’ll get back to you next year and find out. Thanks again for your time, and we’re looking forward to your next book on higher ed. I’m sure it will be very interesting.
Republished with permission from Bacon’s Rebellion
