Oregon Ducks finish in the Top 10 – but there is a cost

Florida is No. 1 in the AP Top 25; Utah is perfect at No. 2

Oregon finished #10, and Oregon State finished #18. 

InsideHigherEd.com has a discussion of the some of the costs of fielding a top flight sports program in the NCAA, using the Texas Longhorns and Oregon Ducks as examples.

The Article is here

Outdoing the Joneses for once, the University of Oregon anointed one of its assistant football coaches a head-coach-in-waiting, too, at $7 million over 5 years. Meanwhile Oregon, like many other universities, cut its academic budget this fall, resulting in fewer courses, larger class sizes and decreased student services.

Oregon and UT played in bowl games this year. What was the cost of getting there? One cost is that the football players on their teams are “bottom-feeders” in the annual Higher Ed Watch’s Academic BCS Rankings, based on their abysmal graduation rates and their poor graduation ratio between black and white players. The second cost is in dollars that could be going to academic needs. UT’s athletics budget works out to $244,684 per year for each of its 511 athlete-students, but its official student-related expenditures are $11,344 for each student. Oregon spends $108,000 per year for each athlete-student and $9,222 for each enrolled student. The stats are similar at other Division 1 NCAA institutions.

What is the mission of our state university system? Education or sports? When we’re cutting millions of dollars, have a hiring freeze, and struggling to service all of the students trying to enroll, we have to ask … is it worth the cost?