For those wondering how much of that money goes directly to the athletes: if you guessed $0, give yourselves a star! JMU doesn't pay its athletes! 🤣
We've accomplished unnecessarily expensive state uni tuition + student debt, and exploitation of poor Black kids! Now that's American ingenuity! Show me another country that has accomplished this!🇺🇲🦅
That's not a rhetorical question. Seriously. Show me a state university outside of the US that even comes close to this level of absurdity. I'll wait.
🤔 20 years from now, someone will still be working a job that they hate, to earn money to pay off massive student loan debt, $20,000 of which is because of the student fee, that existed because JMU wanted to be good at football and basketball way back in 2024.
@mekkaokereke Roll that back a couple decades: JMU’s been marching in this direction since shortly after I graduated in 2003.
The money cannon was aimed at rebuilding Bridgeforth Stadium while my program was housed in a two-story, rat-infested, second-hand trailer in the woods. 🥴
@ajsadauskas@mekkaokereke Oddly enough, MLB actually does this. I'm not entirely sure why, although I suspect it has to do with less wear-and-tear, they're not using players up and spitting them out.
But seriously, the minor league farm systems, while they also exploit cheap labor, are at least upfront about their role, which is to pay guys $10,000/year and the promise of a shot at the big leagues for maybe 0.1% of them. The rest are basically glorified roadies.
@mekkaokereke I’m heavily involved in academia, and I am not aware of any country in the world where academic sports are a thing. It is the stuff of student unions and amateurs, with a few additional oddities like the boat race in the U.K.
Do you know of any?
@Nicovel0@mekkaokereke Yeah, from a UK or European perspective, the idea there could be money or big public interest in uni sports is bewildering.
Oxbridge have a couple of notoriously easy masters degrees used to give professional rowers a spot in the Boat Race, and that's as far as sports-first education goes. And these cases of coaches paid more than the uni principal... wtf?
@mekkaokereke 20...damn, no, 25 years ago when I was applying to colleges, I seem to remember annual in-state tuition at JMU was in the $5,000-$10,000 range in total.
Of course, around that same time we elected a Republican governor who eliminated a major car tax, and while the tax was unpopular, he neglected to explain to voters how it would be financed. It took another decade before a Republican was elected governor again once suburban parents saw the tuition hikes.
@mekkaokereke I suspect that athletic fee supports “non-revenue” sports like Track & Field and Swimming, and that “revenue sports” make no contribution to that.
One of the biggest scams in college sports, is the claim that athletic departments are so expensive to support the non-revenue sports.
But... there are 4000 universities in the US. The departments that make money are about 40 of the football and basketball programs. And yet... almost all of the 4000 schools somehow find a way to pay for track and wrestling and field hockey? 🤔
Most of the money goes back to revenue generating sports.
If I told you that a big US college Division 1 sports team has nicer facilities than Barcelona FC or Chelsea FC, or than the LA Lakers or Boston Celtics, you might not be able to visualize what that means. Or you might think I'm being hyperbolic. Even if I say that a big D1 program recently spent $288 million on its facilities, you might not be able to picture what that even means. It's easier just to show it:
@mekkaokereke@anildash I’m curious, why call out James Madison specifically and not NCAA schools in general? It’s not as if these fees are unique to James Madison.
@mekkaokereke@anildash Sounds more like a dodge than an answer, but I'll bite. When you say "higher fees" are you referring to the overall mandatory non-educational and general fees? Or just the per-student subsidies that go to the athletic programs?
@mekkaokereke@anildash If the former, just in the state of Virginia... William & Mary, Christopher Newport, Longwood and VMI all had higher mandatory non-E&G fees for 2022-2023 year (obviously the state's 2023-2024 report isn't out yet).
If the latter... (of the FBS schools that have reported their FY2023 disclosures), Marshall, South Alabama, and Coastal Carolina all had higher athletic subsidies per student (via Sportico). Wyoming & Arkansas State fell short by $154 and $165, respectively.
So my point is that JMU has some of the highest fees of any school, so we should temper our enthusiasm about their recent FBS and March madness success.
And your point is that there are other schools with very high fees.
We are agreed! No quarrel here.
(Ah! And I just noticed that you read the Sportico article. So you saw that in addition to being one of the highest overall, JMU has by far the highest public university student fee subsidy).
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