College sports guzzle subsidies: Column

Of all the ways colleges spend money — research, teaching, administrators' salaries, luxury facilities — the place where expenses are growing fastest is in intercollegiate athletics.

Yet despite all the public and political concern about rising costs, it's the issue very few college leaders or elected officials seem willing to tackle.

Likewise, when the proposed college ratings system from the Obama administration debuts this month, you can be sure there won't be any category that grades colleges on how carefully they steward their athletics dollars.

Sports morality

This is more than simply an issue of costs. Athletics spending is a matter of economic equity — perhaps even of morality.

The athletics fees that colleges charge their students don't begin to cover what colleges spend to field those football teams many of us now spend our Saturdays watching. (Nor do they cover their costs for the other teams they support alongside football so they can keep their gender balance in athletics to comply with Title IX, the federal law requiring gender equity in education.)

As USA TODAY has reported, only about two dozen public colleges of 228 in Division I break even on their sports programs, even after counting the millions in broadcasting fees and the loot they make on logo licensing. And as researchers have documented, at many other colleges — many of them smaller public institutions that serve low- and middle-income students and a high proportion of adults — more than $1 out of $5 in tuition revenue goes to subsidize intercollegiate athletic programs.

For the adult students, many of whom also juggling work and child care, that's money for games they will probably never attend. For many of the rest, it's an expense that could add thousands to the student-debt load — a financial burden that will stick with them far longer than the thrill of victory or the agony of defeat.

I've covered higher education for more than 25 years. But it was only in the past year, when I had the chance to dig more deeply into these equity issues while writing a "primer" on the higher-education crisis, that the severity of this little-discussed phenomenon hit home.

If it was new to me, it wasn't to Jeff Smith, a management instructor at the University of South Carolina Upstate who regularly documents such subsidies as part of a broader campaign for more transparency over the trade-offs inherent in colleges' spending on athletics. His outrage bears a hearing: The college population is changing, but too many universities still focus their spending on "traditional" experiences and add-ons not directly tied to education or attaining a degree.

Muted critics

Critics of this spending do exist. Reform groups such as the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics raise alarms about the escalation of college sports spending and the focus on money.

But the realpolitik of college sports can often mute their voices. More than a few observers saw that as the case here in the Washington, D.C., area in 2012.

That was the year the University of Maryland-College Park announced it was shifting to a more lucrative athletics conference, a move derided by some as a crass chase for money and an abandonment of tradition.

Brit Kirwan, chancellor of the Maryland university system, helped oversee the conference shift. He also co-chairs the Knight Commission.

Kirwan says the decision to move from the Atlantic Coast Conference to the Big Ten arose from the College Park leadership, not the system, and says he never saw himself "on the horns of a dilemma" because of his dual role. To the degree that he did endorse the shift, he maintains, it was because the Big Ten also fosters academic collaborations that would benefit College Park.

To be sure, intercollegiate athletics have value. They promote discipline and teamwork, and in some cases they help to cement alumni spirit and support.

But as politicians, business leaders and other would-be reformers continue to scrutinize all the other nooks and crannies of higher education, for some reason the locker room has been off-limits.

One wonders for how long.

Goldie Blumenstyk, a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education, is author of the newly publishedAmerican Higher Education in Crisis? What Everyone Needs to Know.

In addition to its own editorials, USA TODAY publishes diverse opinions from outside writers, including our Board of Contributors. To read more columns like this, go to the Opinion front page or sign up for the daily Opinion e-mail newsletter.