The Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission released a report today detailing all non-academic expenditures for Virginia public schools today. According to the report, except for Virginia Tech and UVA, all state men’s basketball and football teams had financial shortfalls in 2011-12.

The chart below shows that George Mason and VCU had the biggest shortfalls:

One note about the chart, the report states that “each institution has discretion in how it chooses to allocate certain revenue” and it can be spread among the other sports. In short I would think that this means distributions that VT and UVA receive from the NCAA and the ACC (i.e. football TV money) can be allocated among the other sports across the board.

The whole report is an interesting read as I know a lot of you that read this site have sent me questions about the school’s spending on athletics. There is also a section that details ODU’s new football expenditures which I found particularly interesting to read.

A lot of people don’t realize how much of the student fees are used to fund athletics and this report is clearly trying to show what factors into the skyrocketing costs of higher learning. However, other than Virginia Tech, George Mason students pay the least among public VA schools to support athletics.

[via jlarc.virginia.gov]