(06-20-2018 03:03 AM)Attackcoog Wrote:  

(06-20-2018 01:14 AM)Wedge Wrote:  

(06-19-2018 11:15 PM)Attackcoog Wrote:  

(06-19-2018 06:31 PM)Wedge Wrote:  

(06-19-2018 05:56 PM)Attackcoog Wrote:  You are talking about two different things. The "average" cost per student is not the same as the incremental cost for the next student added. In a scholarship situation, only the incremental cost of adding the next student falls all the way to the bottom line. All the other costs involved in educating that additional student were going to be paid whether that extra student is added or not.

You are using the concept of incremental cost to try to get the athletic department out of paying what others would have to pay. I don't agree with that. The fair way to allocate the cost of educating undergraduates is to divide the total cost by the number of all undergraduates, not just by the number of undergraduates who actually pay their own tuition.

I’m not trying to get the athletic department out of anything. I’m saying the budget/cost of athletic subsidies is overstated. It’s like bowl payouts that pay half the so called "million dollar payout" in tickets that will never be sold at their stated "value".

It's not overstated by much. The incremental cost argument doesn't work because it's: You already have 20,000 students paying full price to cover the expenses, it doesn't cost any more to have 20,200 students, thus the athletic department should only have to pay $1 each for the 200 "student-athletes". The reason that's a fallacy is: Why do the scholarship athletes get to be the 200 students who only cost $1 each? Why not have someone pay full price for the athletes and, say, take 200 students majoring in biology who have to work their way through college, call them the "incremental cost", and charge them only $1 each? The answer is: No one student costs only $1. The expense of educating the undergraduates should be allocated equally, and an equal "cost" assigned to each of them.

Incremental cost is pretty darn relevant if the point is to accurately determine savings from cutting athletics. If it costs the same to educate 20000 as 20,200—then cutting athletics isn’t going to save administrators as much as your average allocation model would predict. If the incremental cost is zero (or anything less that the allocated average cost) then all that would happen is the average cost of educating the remaining 20,000 students would rise.

I used to work as Dean of Graduate Studies. We faced a similar situation in how we allocated tuition remission for graduate students. It is a far from simple situation.

True, there is not an incremental instructional cost when you put another student into a class that is under-enrolled. However, there comes a point that additional students result in the need to increase the number of class sections offered. We tried to allocate tuition remission in areas in which the enrollment in classes was below the optimum level. (We also tended to do partial tuition remissions so that each student contributed at least something to the pot of funds, but that is not really a factor in D1 athletics.)

Most D1 athletic programs that sponsor football have upwards of 300 scholarship athletes. It would be unreasonable to expect that such a number of students can be absorbed without increasing the number of sections needed. If you look at it realistically,there will be about 160 lower division (Fr. Soph.) students in that. Since they are taking required general education and intro courses you might be having to add about two dozen sections to accommodate that need. (160 time 5 classes is 800 student course enrollments. When that is divided by 30/class is 26+ courses needed.) This assumes that upper division courses are spread out across many disciplines and can be added and/or that some space was available in lower division courses to balance any added upper division courses

There is simply no way to slip in that number of students without creating a need for more course sections.

Folks are right that to a large extent an institution will choose to absorb those costs for a variety of reasons. That is why most institutions provide a subsidy from general funds to partially cover the cost of the athletics program. However good institutional management requires that you account for those costs so that a reasonable cost/benefit analysis can be done to inform decisions on whether to continue, cease or modify the practice.