The High Point Solutions Stadium in Piscataway, N.J. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Remember that tour of Rutgers most of us took our senior year of high school, when we were looking at schools? The one that began at the Visitors Center on Busch and highlighted the school’s most important contributions, including its longstanding status as “the birthplace of college football?” It’s hard to believe that a Division I athletics department with that kind of legacy would need to be funded through university subsidies, at the expense of the school’s academics budgets. Alarmingly enough, that’s exactly what is happening, and anyone who pays tuition to the university is helping to bankroll an athletics program that would be in bankruptcy otherwise.

A closer look at the Rutgers athletics budget

Rutgers University is not rolling in money by any definition of the expression. With only 20 percent of the school’s budget provided through state appropriations, and almost 40 percent coming from student tuition payments and fees, you would think Rutgers would be trying to funnel as much of the students’ money into their education as possible. You would be wrong.

From 2005 to 2011, the university’s academic spending per student increased 12 percent, while its athletic spending per athlete during that same period increased 106 percent. Thanks to an athletics department that hasn’t generated enough revenue to break even, let alone turn a profit in the last three years, the university has had to use a significant portion of student fees to keep the athletics department afloat.

In 2012, Bloomberg News calculated that Rutgers Athletics’ $28 million university subsidy was roughly the equivalent of taking $1,000 from every student’s tuition bill and using it for athletics purposes. To put all this in perspective, the School of Arts and Sciences, the largest undergraduate school within the university, has accrued a $25 million deficit over the last three years, almost as much as the athletics budget deficit for 2012 alone. On average, student fees cover as much as 15 percent of the athletics budget.

A note on student fees, as defined by Professor Mark Killingsworth of the Economics department at Rutgers, and a scholar analyzing the athletics department’s fiscal crisis: “The ‘student activity fee’ you see [on your tuition] helps pay for buses and computing costs, but basically it’s just a pool of money that the administration gets that they can use for whatever purpose they see fit, and if they were honest about it, they would simply call it tuition.”

It gets worse. Remember Mike Rice? Tim Pernetti? The huge media scandal that one video caused? Buying Coach Rice and Director Pernetti out of their contracts, not to mention providing them with whatever undisclosed golden parachute they walked away with, only added to the department’s financial woes. Add to that the costs associated not only with entering the Big Ten conference, but the fees the school must pay to the Big East conference in order to exit, and it’s a recipe for disaster.

In a financial report to the National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA), Rutgers revealed that its subsidy to the athletics department increased by a whopping 67.9 percent last year, to nearly $47 million. We can now add another accomplishment to the university’s Hall of Shame: most highly subsidized sports program at a public university in the nation.

So why is this happening, and why can the university do this? I sat down with Professor Mark Killingsworth of the Economics department to find out. According to Professor Killingsworth, Rutgers cannot afford to be spending so much money on athletics at the expense of its academics. The university has begun to increasingly rely on part-time professors, graduate students, and lecturers to lead classes as opposed to tenured professors, whose salaries are becoming too much for the school to fund. Professor Killingsworth is worried by this shift in focus. “We’re in the education business, not the entertainment business,” he says.

According to an article by Moody’s Investors Service, the main contribution a (read: successful) football team makes to the university that commissions it is that it provides brand recognition for the school.

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Professor Killingsworth does not consider sufficient reason to funnel so much money to the program. “There are other ways to persuade prospective students to apply to Rutgers,” he says. “One very good measure of whether all this athletic stuff has done us any good is to examine the yield, which are the percentage of students admitted to Rutgers that actually choose to come to Rutgers. And our yield has not changed at all, relative to our peer institutions.”

In 2012, Rutgers University left the Big East conference to join the Big Ten, and Rutgers athletics will begin playing in the Big Ten starting in the fall 2014. In July 2013, Rutgers completed its acquisition of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, and the new combined student body has made Rutgers one of the biggest schools in the country, while UMDNJ and Rutgers’ now-combined research budget surpasses that of Ivy League universities such as Harvard. As the new medical complex develops bearing the scarlet R, Rutgers has a real chance of competing with other major research universities on an academic level.

Leaving the Big East alone cost the university over $10 million in fines, and joining the Big Ten will require even more spending on athletics, to get the school’s facilities up to par with Big Ten standards. Some argue that the costs of joining the Big Ten will offset the potential profits Rutgers stands to gain. Rutgers would be competing against schools like Ohio State University, which has the second-biggest athletic budget in the country and is entirely self-funded. Greg Brown, head of the athletics committee operating under the Board of Governors, told the Board the school could make $200 million over the next 12 years by joining the prestigious conference. According to NJ.com, Rutgers has the lowest endowment of all schools in the Big Ten.

By now, I’m sure you’re beginning to wonder whether the Board of Governors has any plans to address the athletics budget deficit. According to the school’s latest strategic plan, which is published by the Office of the President and released in February of this year, they’re not really sure. To quote one of the plan’s initiatives to improve the university’s public prominence:

Rutgers will remain committed to ethical athletic programs that sustain academic progress alongside competitive athletic performance for student athletes. Based on a multi-year financial plan, Athletics will move toward financial independence from the University’s general fund.

“They’ve been very unspecific about it,” Professor Killingsworth points out. “They say things like the athletics department will be ‘budget-neutral in 5–8 years.’” He’s right. The language of this year’s strategic plan is ambiguous at best when it comes to tackling the athletics department’s fiscal woes.

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How many Earth years are in a multi-year? Two? Five? Fifteen? What exactly comprises this “general fund” from which the Athletics department will declare its independence as soon as they devise an answer to the multi-year question? Are student fees part of the university’s general fund?

Over sixty pages of strategic planning, and not one specific, concrete plan of attack for reviving the athletics department, or for ridding the university of its financially crippling obligations to the athletics department. According to Killingsworth, “Rutgers in general is in good financial standing. But I have a sinking feeling that in a lot of ways we’re spending money on the wrong things.” Asked if the athletics program could drag down the financial standing of the university, Killingsworth replied, “Of course. Absolutely. President Barchi told the editorial board of the Star-Ledger last May that athletics is ‘siphoning dollars from the academic mission.’”

So if an expensive football program is not getting us any more brand recognition than we had before its existence, the answer to how to attract more students to the university must lie elsewhere. Killingsworth suggests building an institution that is “actually credible, academically.”

“We’re not Alabama,” he says. “Frankly, I don’t think we should even want to be Alabama.” Killingsworth calls the shift in university focus from academics to athletics, “a complete inversion of priorities. It’s totally crazy.”

So the next time you wonder why there’s a graduate student with six months’ more life experience than you teaching your class, or why all three sections of that class that you and 700 of your classmates need for your major are closed 45 seconds after registration opens because there aren’t enough qualified professors on staff to offer more sections, remember that your tuition money has found a happier home funding what Killingsworth refers to as the “pet project of the Board of Governors”: the athletics department.