Like many college radio stations across the country, Rice University’s KTRU and Vanderbilt University’s WRVU play a broad swath of music  from undiscovered indie bands and obscure blues acts to ’60s garage rock and ’80s postpunk. It’s a mix largely absent from commercial broadcasts, and students active in radio say their stations add distinct voices to their cities’ broadcast landscape.

But as colleges across the country look for ways to tighten budgets amid recession-induced shortfalls, some administrators  most recently in the South  have focused on college radio, leading even well-endowed universities to sell off their FM stations. That trend was felt this summer at Rice and Vanderbilt, among the most prominent of Southern universities, stirring debate about the viability of broadcast radio, the reach of online broadcasting and the value of student broadcast programming.

“We play music that you won’t find on any other Houston radio station” said Joey Yang, a junior at Rice and station manager for KTRU. “KTRU’s mission is to broadcast exactly what you can’t find elsewhere on the dial.”

Scott Cardone, a sophomore disk jockey at WRVU with a two-hour electric blues show, pointed to the potential void in Nashville if Vanderbilt’s FM signal were to be sold. “The community will lose what probably is the last radio station playing anything other than country, Christian or Top 40 in the whole city,” he said. “You can’t hear the music that we play anywhere else.”