The James Madison men’s basketball team lost its NCAA tournament game against Duke over the weekend, but JMU has still finished first in one national category — just not a good one.
A recent report by Sportico, a news site devoted to covering “the business of sports,” said that JMU used more money in student fees to support intercollegiate athletics than any other school in the country.
In second place was Old Dominion University. “The James Madison athletic department spent $68 million on athletics in fiscal 2023 and reported funding $53.3 million of it via mandatory student fees, charged annually to every JMU student as part of their tuition,” Sportico wrote. “It’s by far the largest sum of any public school in the country, $23 million more than Old Dominion’s student fee subsidy,” which Sportico put at $30.3 million. In third place was the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, at $24.9 million.
Disclosure: I’m a JMU grad and count myself a fan, although this report made me see red, rather than purple and gold.
There are several caveats and qualifications that must be added here before we can discuss this further.
Kevin Warner, JMU’s associate athletic director for communications and strategic initiatives, said the numbers for JMU are accurate, but the comparison with other schools may not be. “The Sportico report approached this article attempting to compare student fees across institutions and did not dig deeper as to why that is the case, but the reality is that it’s impossible to accurately compare student fees because there is no standardized accounting, reporting structure and revenue model across institutions and college athletics,” he told me by email.
This rings true to me. Different institutions often do things in different ways, so maybe we shouldn’t get hung up on JMU’s No. 1 ranking and pay more attention to the actual numbers. Whether JMU ranks 1 or 100, the actual dollar figures are what matter to the students (and the parents) who are paying them.
There are also some extenuating circumstances as to why JMU’s figure was so high.
The first is COVID-related. “The most recent year in particular was higher than normal because the state of Virginia during COVID allowed institutions to defer some debt charges when everyone was feeling the economic crunch of the ceasing of operations during COVID,” Warner said. “That deferred payment came out this past year, resulting in a higher jump than usual.” Sportico reported that deferred debt amounted to $4 million of the $53.3 million.
The second is related to JMU’s move to the Sun Belt Conference. As is typical when a school joins a new conference, JMU won’t get a full cut of television revenues right away. “JMU has leaned on student fees to help cover other revenue increases that might eventually be covered by the full Sun Belt revenue share,” Sportico wrote.
Under a state law that took effect in 2015 — then-Del. Kirk Cox, R-Colonial Heights and a JMU grad was the sponsor — JMU can subsidize no more than 55% of its athletic budget from student fees. (Cox was no sports-hater, either; he once coached high school baseball.) Sportico quoted an unnamed JMU spokesman saying, “JMU’s plan to manage student fee revenue was presented to and approved by the state prior to its Sun Belt move. The university is employing that plan, which allows for seven years to be fully compliant with the 55% limit.”
For 2022-23, JMU’s figure was 78%; the year before it was 78.5%. At the University of Virginia and Virginia Tech, the cap under the Cox law is 20% and their reliance on student fees is much lower. At Virginia, it’s 11.6%; at Virginia Tech, 11.5%.
All that’s a long way of saying that JMU’s figures are only temporarily high — and may be impossible to compare with other schools around the country — so let’s not get hung up on the No. 1 rating or perhaps even the $53.3 million in student fees, since it sounds like that will come down once JMU is fully vested in the Sun Belt Conference.
Instead, let’s focus on something else: Why must students at any school pay any mandatory fee to support intercollegiate athletics?
All colleges charge some kind of fees beyond tuition. It seems a bit like buying a car: The sticker price might be low, but then there are some mandatory add-ons that drive up the price. Some of these fees I understand. Schools operate student health centers; they operate extracurricular activities. Purists might argue that even those should be optional fees, paid only by those who use them, but I’m not going to dispute those. We don’t want a situation where a student is afraid to go to the student health center because they don’t have the money to pay for medical attention. Most students may never participate in intramural sports, either, but I can make the argument that it’s fine to use student fees for those because the presence of such programs contributes to the overall quality of life at the school — if students choose not to participate, that’s up to them.
Why, though, must students be forced to pay for what amounts these days to minor league sports programs?
Right now, Virginia politics are in turmoil over whether the state should get involved in helping build a sports arena in Alexandria; one of the arguments against that proposal is that state taxpayers shouldn’t be on the hook in case the venture doesn’t meet projections and winds up needing subsidies. However, every student at a Virginia public university is forced, as a condition of their enrollment, to help subsidize semi-pro sports.
Where is the outrage there?
How can conservatives support this? This seems like a tax by another name. How can liberals support this? This is a regressive fee imposed on a population least able to pay (and also not in much of a position to protest).
Warner, the JMU associate athletic director, says his school is more transparent than others in how these fees are used — and in my attempt to compare them with others in Virginia, he’s right. I’m just not sure that transparency makes things any better.
JMU, unlike many other schools, publishes a very good breakdown of how those student fees are used.
For fiscal year 2024, JMU’s mandatory student fee is $5,662. Of that, the biggest amount — $2,362 — goes for intercollegiate athletics, a program that most students do not participate in.
JMU has one of the lowest tuitions of any state university in Virginia, but one of the highest mandatory fees, according to the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia. When you add them together, JMU’s price advantage disappears. These figures come from SCHEV’s report for 2022-23, the most recent available. JMU’s tuition then was $7,684, lower than Radford’s $8,252 and Virginia Tech’s $12,289. However, when you add in mandatory fees, along with tuition and board, JMU’s total price tag rose to $25,032, more than Radford’s $22,340 although still lower (barely) than Tech’s $25,422.
More specific to my point here, JMU had the third-biggest amount of student fees going to intercollegiate athletics of any state school in Virginia. Only Virginia Military Institute and Longwood University were higher; VMI often skews things because it’s such a different kind of institution and Longwood, like JMU, has the disadvantage of being in a small market.
For that school year 2022-23, JMU charged each student $2,886 for intercollegiate athletics versus a state average of $1,765. (Let’s give credit where credit is due: That JMU figure has come down a few hundred dollars since then.)
The lowest figure charged to students for intercollegiate athletics was at the school that has the highest media revenue and the highest ticket sales: Virginia Tech. At Blacksburg, students paid $384 toward intercollegiate sports.
If JMU wants to operate a Division I sports program and play at the highest level of college football, that’s great, but why should students foot the bill? Sportico says that donors at JMU contribute $4,867,292 toward a $68,035,339 budget for college sports. Ticket sales accounted for $3,818,400. Media rights, the big revenue category for some schools, are listed as $0 for JMU in 2022-23, presumably because that Sun Belt money hasn’t kicked in yet. However, the Sun Belt school with the most media revenue that year was Louisiana-Lafayette — at $1,736,303, so it doesn’t sound as if Sun Belt TV money is going to help that much.
I hope this doesn’t get me disinvited from my upcoming class reunion, but maybe a school in Harrisonburg, in the shadow of schools in the Atlantic Coast Conference, simply doesn’t have a big enough market to compete at the highest levels. If well-heeled alumni (of which I am not one) think it’s important for the school to compete at that level, I’ll cheer them on — but why must it be done by reaching into the pockets of students?
I realize this may seem like I’m picking on JMU, but the same principles apply to every state university — JMU just had the misfortune of turning up No. 1, rightly or wrongly, in that Sportico report.
Here’s the budgetary reality as I see it: If Virginia legislators want to make college more affordable, they won’t need to appropriate a single extra tax dollar in the state budget — they could simply ban state universities from using any mandatory student fees for intercollegiate athletics. Using the 2022-23 figures from SCHEV, that would cut the price of attending JMU and Longwood by 11.5%. At Christopher Newport, the price would go down 9.5%. At Old Dominion, 7.6%. At Radford, 6.2%. Those seem like pretty meaningful reductions to me.
I can hear the sports fans yelling now: But that would wreck college sports! To which I say: So?
I fully understand how college sports can serve as a unifying force — and a good marketing tool for a university. However, we’ve moved a long way from the quaint concept of college sports as an idle weekend pastime. We’re talking business here — an entertainment business, where coaches routinely make more money than college presidents and athletics departments employ more people than many academic departments. In Alexandria, we’re told by some that taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay for something a billionaire owner could build himself — if this is such a good idea, let the free market work it out. Why doesn’t the same principle apply here?