Athletic Dept deficits
- Thread starter acoustimac
- Start date
I'd love to have baseball back, that ship has sailed and is well over the horizon.
Thing is people will do other recreating. It might not be in those specific areas, but it will be somewhere. For example last weekend our family went to a tulip festival. This weekend we’ll do something else. It’s just where those dollars are spent in the local ecosystem.
Certainly some gameday spending would go somewhere else, but would it be the local/regional economy? The tulip festival, using your example, doesn't directly compete with athletics and I don't know that it's worth millions of dollars to the Ames/region economy.
not so much deficits, but this is rather eye opening... specifically UNI...
How the hell can yoy lose a million a yr on fencing? Find some other local colleges put kids in a van and send them there. Or just drop the program.
What a wonderful document. Easy to read. Unlike the statement the Iowa legislature made counties send to local taxpayers a couple of years ago. Sorry to hijack a thread but.......
WHY does UofIowa get $45M more in state appropriations than ISU? ($223.5M vs $178.4M). Iowa State has both more total enrollment and especially more students from the state of Iowa (whom are the ones the state legislature should be supporting). The state of Iowa pays for a larger % of a larger budget for UofIowa vs. a smaller % on a smaller budget for ISU. If they kept % consistent between the two ISU either gets more $ or UofI gets less. If they kept $ amount consistent, obviously ISU gets more and/or UofI gets less.
Spending between the two (Iowa left vs. ISU right)
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Around 2011 or 12 Branstad and the Regents had promoted a funding model that would determine funding by in-state students, which of course makes sense for the reasons you point out. But our moron state legislators shot it down. So there is no rationale, everyone knows it’s dumb, but U of I was going to lose money so our dumber than dirt state government decided against it
The losses in the other sports are in part due to the travel expenses that have been necessary because of all the conference changes and loss of geographic boundaries that is 100% due to football. So, although football on paper makes money, in reality a lot of the losses are also due to football. Flying the softball team to Tucson is a lot more expensive than busing them to Lincoln.
I contacted my representative back them to tell them to support this plan, they just sent back a canned BS letter claiming U of I's majors cost more to operate. They will cost whatever you appropriate, it's the way all government entities work. Too many U of I lawyers in the legislature for this to change unfortunately.
Football and MBB make money because of their media contracts, plan and simple. Almost all of the conferences are giving away their other sports just to get them on tv. Take away the media money from MBB and it would lose money also, while increased costs have occurred because of more travel, you have other remember why these schools agreed to leave the conference they were in and join a conference a thousand miles away. USC and UCLA do not enjoy the travel, but they sure like being part of the BTN and getting that large check every year.
One game at JTS brings in more people than 4 MBB games at Hilton, along with more parking revenue and concessions. Football also brings in a lot more donation money than basketball in the power conferences except for the few blue blood MBB schools. Increased travel is just another expense to get into the game, lucky for ISU we are in the middle of the country which does limit the costs some. The east and west coast teams are paying a bundle for travel each year, even with their setup to play at least two road games each trip. It's a lot cheaper to take the ISU teams to Arizona and play two games than for Maryland or Rutgers to fly to Washington and Oregon for two games, plus the time it takes.
The states reasoning is that it costs more to train doctors, dentists and lawyers than engineers and people going into Ag programs. It's a BS reason, instead of just saying the legislature and the BOR favors EIU over the other two state schools, and if many had their way, both UNI and ISU would become the University of Iowa at Ames and the University of Iowa at Cedar Falls. They envision a system much like Wisconsin and Minnesota have where there is the one major university and lots of smaller satellite universities all throughout the state.
If there was one unified school system...where would the athletic teams play? With the heart of the states population around Des Moines (and growth) and Ames being geographically more central, would the ISU campus be the logical location?
I know this will never happen...but think of the advantages that Nebraska, Wisconsin, Minnesota have in regards to only investing in one athletic facility site.
You know where they would be played, everything would be in Iowa City, with ISU and UNI forced down to smaller conferences. This might have worked 100 years ago, but not now. Really the powers that be do not worry about UNI, they are already down in a lower conference, their entire plan was to force ISU down to a lesser conference and then most of the funding and donations goes to EIU.
What should have happened once the capital was moved from IC to Des Moines, then the state university should have followed, but that was before the Morrell Act which brought land grant schools into existence, once that happened, there was no going back. Many states have two primary colleges, one a land grant university and the other for lawyers, doctors and such. Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Pennsylvania and many others have at least a two university system and make it work, much like Iowa does.
The justification was embarrassing. The people that torpedoed the plan kept bringing up U of I hospital and med school, and it was made very clear over and over again that U of I hospital had its own operation that was not part of this budget model for the regents institutions.
Typically the undergrads for lawyers and doctors are some of the cheapest to complete. It's a bunch of LAS type majors typically that have the lowest costs vs. engineering and business. And post-undergrad, the expensive stuff the med students do tends to fall in the hospital operations. As for law, the JD program actually isn't that terribly expensive to operate, it only consists of <2% of their enrollment, and like any of these, schools charge differential tuition by program.
It's just another example where our legislators prove to be dumber than ****. Not that you can't watch a typical interview on the news and draw that conclusion quite easily anyway. Iowa running a massive deficit, being at the bottom of the barrel in terms of economic growth and plummeting in many typical metrics of academics, health, economics, brain drain, are reflective in our government.
Has this been posted?
According to the Quad City Times ISU will be making about $1 mil on the Luke Combs concert, and all of it will be put into the general athletic fund.
According to the Quad City Times ISU will be making about $1 mil on the Luke Combs concert, and all of it will be put into the general athletic fund.
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If the legislature was really serious about funding education for Iowans, UNI would have approximately double the funding it does.
78% of UNI grads stay in state and 84% of teachers in non-metro districts attended UNI for at least 3 semesters.
As for the two bigger universities, Iowa State sees 51% stay in state and Iowa sees 41% stay in state.
The entire funding model needs to keep up with where we're at in 2026
78% of UNI grads stay in state and 84% of teachers in non-metro districts attended UNI for at least 3 semesters.
As for the two bigger universities, Iowa State sees 51% stay in state and Iowa sees 41% stay in state.
The entire funding model needs to keep up with where we're at in 2026
The Bloomfield paper had a great editorial this week about the change in taxes in the state, according to the article 25 years ago state appropriations made up 64% of revenue for the state university while 31% came from tuition, today its been flipped. Today only 28% of appropriations come from revenues while 67% comes from tuition. The state has flipped the cost of a college education away from the state and on to the students and their parents that are attending the universities.
Well, the Athletic Dept "owns" and runs the Iowa State Center now, so I would expect all revenues to go to them, since all expenses also go to them.
