A few sports at a few U.S. universities generate billions of dollars in total. The rest hemorrhage money. For decades, this was an easy circle for schools to square: The money from football and basketball was spent on sports such as squash, water polo, rowing, tennis, golf, and field hockey.
But this system was monumentally unfair. The football and basketball players, disproportionately Black and poor, entranced millions of TV viewers and enriched their universities. Rather than compensating them, administrators turned around and spent much of the money subsidizing teams that go largely unwatched.
Recent court cases have produced major policy changes: Star athletes can now be paid by advertisers, fans, and as of this summer, their schools. This has spooked those on the other side of the equation, whose sports are getting cut to free up money to pay the football players. “That’s not fair, you know?” Cochise Wanzer, the father of twin collegiate divers, told The Washington Post, after both of his sons lost their roster spots because of budget reductions.
Yet allowing colleges to pay revenue-generating athletes is long overdue. If that means cutting the diving team because athletic budgets are finite, so be it.
In the struggle of subsidized squash against the powerful forces of the free market, President Donald Trump has sided with the former. In an executive order signed late last month, he declared that “opportunities for scholarships and collegiate athletic competition in women’s and non-revenue sports must be preserved and, where possible, expanded.” (Whether he has the legal authority to enforce these requirements is, to put it lightly, unclear.)
Protecting women’s access to college sports is a matter of settled federal law—Title IX is interpreted to require equitable athletic opportunities for men and women. But blanket protection for nonrevenue sports, which Trump’s order calls “the backbone of intercollegiate athletics,” would help preserve an arbitrary status quo. If you’re an excellent high-school-squash player, you might be admitted to a school that you would otherwise not get into, and that might pay for your tuition, even if your parents could have afforded it. (Student athletes come from disproportionately wealthy backgrounds, and many nonrevenue sports are distinctly upscale pastimes.) When you arrive, you’ll be treated to expensive travel, fancy merch, and a get-out-of-class-free card. If you’re equally good at chess or violin or oil painting, however, none of this is an option.
Where does the money for nonrevenue sports come from? Revenue-generating sports put up some of the cost; the student body (or tuition-paying parents) tends to cover the rest. James Madison University, for example, is unusually transparent about this nonconsensual sponsorship agreement: Each student pays a mandatory $2,362 a year to support the university’s athletics.
In the race to secure applicants and alumni donations, colleges see this as money worth spending—and charging students for. But the usual rationales for most intercollegiate sports don’t add up. If the goal is to promote school spirit, why does almost nobody go to the games? If the goal is to promote fitness, why not do so directly, rather than count on the tennis and lacrosse teams to set a good example? If the goal is teaching teamwork and resilience, why recruit and admit a special group of students to hoard these learning opportunities? From an academic standpoint, the traditional athletics program is a negative: According to NCAA figures, athletes typically spend 30 hours a week on their sports.
Originally, college athletics were cheap and nonintensive. Some stronger-than-average Yale and Harvard students rode a train to New Hampshire in 1852 to face off in a rowing race, the first-ever intercollegiate sporting event. For a while, that system of athletic amateurism continued. Even today, a version of this system exists, known as club sports. As an undergrad, I played club soccer and club table tennis against teams from other colleges. We paid dues to help fund our modest operating costs—we had no coaches—and offered financial aid to students who couldn’t afford those dues.
Over the past 75 years, NCAA sports has become ever more professionalized. Football and men’s basketball began to generate eye-watering sums of money, incentivizing colleges to invest more resources in them. Revenue generated by those teams subsidized the school’s less popular teams. The roster of sports continued to expand as more and more women enrolled in higher education and schools added teams to comply with Title IX.
To protect the “amateur” status of the athletes, a rigid policing structure was created to make sure they never earned any money off their sports, no matter how much they generated for their universities. Not only could colleges not pay them, but the players couldn’t accept any money or gifts as a reward for their athletic achievement. They couldn’t charge to sign autographs or even accept complimentary meals from local restaurants when their 250-pound bodies got hungry.
In the mid-2000s, the running back Reggie Bush was the best player on a football team that generated tens of millions of dollars for the University of Southern California. His Heisman Trophy and the team’s national championship were stripped after the NCAA found out that marketing agents had bought him a $13,000 car, let his parents stay in an empty investment property, and paid for their airfare so they could watch him play. (His Heisman was reinstated last year.) Ohio State players were suspended for multiple games for, among other things, accepting discounts on tattoos. Reggie Bush went on to the NFL, but not every college sports star can go pro. The most egregiously unfair cases regarded the football players who were crucial to their juggernaut teams, never got paid for their work, and just barely missed out on a professional career.
By contract, about 50 percent of NFL and NBA revenue goes to the players. At that rate, according to a 2020 National Bureau of Economic Research paper, college football players at the top 65 schools would have been paid about $360,000 a year, and basketball players about $500,000. Instead, for decades, they got nothing.
This began to change in 2021. In National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Alston, the Supreme Court unanimously held that certain rules against athlete compensation violated federal antitrust law. Shortly thereafter, the NCAA allowed players to receive pay for the use of their name, image, and likeness. This dramatically shifted the economics of big-time college sports. Top players at major programs can now make millions of dollars in endorsement deals. “Donors” eager to attract talent to their favorite team provide compensation to many other players, nominally in exchange for showing up at some events.
A legal settlement approved in June gave athletes another way to cash in: Universities are now allowed to directly pay athletes, up to a total of $20.5 million a year per school. Because some schools will compensate revenue-generating athletes in order to attract top talent, other athletes fear they’ll make room in the budget by cutting the teams that don’t generate any revenue at all. This fear has been especially pronounced about women’s sports, which typically generate less money, but Title IX ensures that any cut would affect men and women equally. In practice, universities that continue to field teams in their most lucrative men’s sports would also maintain their most popular women’s teams. Not every school will necessarily keep football and men’s basketball in perpetuity—at many schools, even those sports have little following.
Supporters of the existing system fear that the country will lose out if universities drop niche sports. In comments earlier this month, Trump noted that college sports are the primary training ground for American Olympians. But a negligible fraction of college athletes will ever compete in the Olympics, and many Olympic sports aren’t played at the intercollegiate level anyway.
Cuts to nonrevenue sports might be a good thing. Instead of giving admissions, scholarships, and resources to the best cross-country runners, for example, colleges could accept the most qualified applicants, spend money to provide them the best education, and offer financial aid to as many needy students as they can.
Students would remain free to pursue hobbies, including sports. They just wouldn’t be rewarded with scholarships and other benefits for doing so. Trump’s order purportedly seeks to “maximize the educational benefits and opportunities provided by higher education institutions through athletics.” Awarding scarce benefits and opportunities on the basis of talent in niche sports is one way to run an educational system, but it’s not one worth preserving.
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