Colorado State University’s on-campus football stadium opened 2½ years ago.

While the debate over the real and perceived impacts of the $220 million stadium have since quieted, unease over the university’s increased athletic spending is still roiling in the stadium's shadow.

Citing annual NCAA reports that show the university’s “subsidy” to athletics — funding from CSU's general fund and a mandatory student athletic fee — had increased to $25.4 million in 2018-19, CSU’s Faculty Council passed a resolution Nov. 5 urging the “administration to significantly reduce athletic program subsidies, and to use the savings to support the university’s primary academic mission.”

The resolution, faculty council's first in 11 years and one of only a handful in the past 35 years to be approved and forwarded to the administration, passed by a 46-24 vote with one of the council's voting members abstaining. The 128-member Faculty Council has 103 eligible voters representing the university's thousands of academic faculty.

Faculty Council members Steven Shulman and Mary Meyer said the resolution's goal is to redirect some university support for athletics to reduce what students are paying in tuition and fees.

“You look back over the past decade, and the subsidy has essentially doubled,” Shulman, an economics professor, said. “So, even though athletics gets bigger and bigger and does generate more and more revenue, it is generating even more and more costs. So, it keeps relying more and more on support from the university. The program is becoming less and less self-sufficient over time.”

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CSU’s athletic department received nearly $8 million from the university’s general fund and nearly $4 million from student athletic fees for a total “subsidy” of nearly $12 million in 2008-09, according to annual financial reports it sends to the NCAA. Over the ensuing decade, that amount increased to $25.4 million during the 2017-18 academic year.

"It's a topic that's been discussed for many years," said Tim Gallagher, a business professor who has chaired CSU's Faculty Council for six of the past nine years. "There's growing concern about the relative spending of academics vs. athletics, and the resolution is reflective of a view that's shared by the large majority of the faculty."

The athletic department's 2018-19 NCAA financial report, which wasn’t yet available when the Faculty Council passed its resolution, showed a slight dip in university support to $23.7 million.

CSU spent $54.3 million on athletics in 2018-19, including debt payments of $8.1 million on the bonds that were sold to finance construction of Canvas Stadium. Those payments increase to $12.2 million in 2021.

Gallagher said he forwarded the “Faculty Council Resolution on Budget Priorities” to first-year CSU President Joyce McConnell in an email the day after the vote was taken and she responded immediately, saying she would schedule a meeting with the Faculty Council's 12-member executive committee for further discussion. That meeting, which Gallagher described as "cordial and productive," took place Tuesday.

Athletic director Joe Parker, through a school spokesman, referred questions concerning the Faculty Council resolution to McConnell's office, which made CSU's Provost and Executive Vice President Rick Miranda available to the Coloradoan for this story.

Miranda said members of the Faculty Council have the “right to express their opinion” and criticize the university’s administration, which chose to increase its investment in athletics over the past decade. Miranda is a non-voting member of the council and participated in discussions about the resolution before it was passed.

Still, in an interview with the Coloradoan earlier this month, he took issue with the first part of the Faculty Council’s five-part resolution: “Whereas instructional spending per student at CSU has remained flat, after accounting for inflation, since 2009.”

Instructional spending has increased from $199 million in 2008-09 to $380.8 million in 2017-18 — an increase of more than 91%, according to annual reports the university is required to file in order to receive federal financial aid money. That’s well above the 19.2% cumulative rate of inflation over that same time period.

Salary and wages for faculty and staff increased 37% over the same decade, according to the reports, and instructional spending per student increased from $8,223 in 2008-09 to $13,085 in 2018-19.

“That’s much faster than the rate of inflation,” Miranda said. “So I feel pretty good about our investments in academics over this period.”

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But it’s not nearly as fast as the growth in the university’s athletic budget, which more than doubled over the past decade, according to NCAA reports. The “subsidy” provided by the university to support athletics also more than doubled during that time, growing at a rate that “is really going up much faster” than at CSU’s self-identified peer institutions and other land-grant universities, said Meyer, a statistics professor.

CSU’s athletic subsidy, as defined by the NCAA reports, was the second-highest in the Mountain West, trailing only Air Force’s $40.3 million, and the 21st-highest among the 230 NCAA Division I schools included in a USA TODAY Sports database.

How did we get here?

Debate over athletic spending at CSU and other major universities is nothing new. Eastern Washington University's Faculty Senate released a report last week calling for reductions in athletic spending.

At CSU, passage of the resolution was more about timing than anything else, Gallagher said. With a new president, McConnell, taking over July 1, 2019, Shulman asked the Faculty Council's executive committee last spring to put a resolution calling for a reduction in athletic spending on the agenda for an upcoming meeting, Gallagher said.

Shulman asked McConnell directly about her thoughts on athletic spending, noting the $25.4 million subsidy, during her first appearance before the Faculty Council in September.

"I know your numbers are wrong; I'm not going to engage," according to minutes of that meeting. "If we are going to engage, I want to base this on facts. ... I am happy to discuss it further."

She went on to say that she supports athletics and that they play an important role in the university's "marketing" by providing television visibility and additional links to alumni and the Fort Collins community.

Story continues below chart.

Faculty Council members like Shulman and Meyer argue that the university's existing students are unnecessarily burdened by this brand of marketing.

Mandatory student fees for full-time CSU students are $867.71 for the spring semester, including $115.61 for athletics which “partially funds debt service, payroll and operating expenses,” according to the fee schedule on the university’s admissions website. In exchange for payment of that fee, students are admitted free to all of the school’s home football, men’s and women’s basketball and volleyball games.

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Full-time tuition for undergraduate students for the spring semester ranges from $4,713 for an in-state student to $14,073 for an out-of-state student. The CSU admissions office estimates the average cost of attendance for the nine-month academic year as about $28,000 for an in-state student and more than $47,000 for an out-of-state student.

Many students, Meyer and Shulman said, are working two or three jobs during the school year to help pay for their education. As a result, they don't always have the time and energy required to be successful in the classroom.

Some Faculty Council members, including two professors who were former student-athletes, argued against the resolution. They said intercollegiate athletics bring a lot of students from diverse backgrounds to CSU who otherwise wouldn’t have come to the school.

There are many other benefits that don’t necessarily fit neatly onto an accounting balance sheet, Miranda said.

“We have hundreds of student-athletes who are generally very successful in academics and on the playing field,” Miranda said. “They bring things to this campus that can’t be brought any other way. They are a unique investment in our students that have benefits to our alumni, other friends, to philanthropy, to community life, to the whole ambiance of the place."

Shulman acknowledges that athletics can have a positive impact on a university’s image when things are going well. But he said it can also have the reverse effect, as shown by scandals in recent years at Penn State, Baylor and Michigan State, among others.

He said his primary concern is that CSU's athletic department hasn’t been held to the same standard as the university’s eight colleges and 56 academic departments.

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They were all notified they needed to generate more of their own revenue ever since the state of Colorado’s “budget crisis” of 2008-09, when state funding for higher education was slashed by 13.7% in a single year. The state taxpayer-funded contribution to CSU’s annual budget of more than $1.3 billion in 2018-19 was a little more than $110 million, or just 8.5% — down significantly from its 16% share 10 years earlier.

The athletic department has increased its self-generated revenue significantly over the past decade, from just more than $2.4 million in 2008-09 to $7.3 million. Yet it still requires a larger infusion of money from student fees — which are voted on and approved by student government — and the general fund each year.

“Unlike athletics, when we need money, we have to generate it, and nobody is bailing us out,” Shulman said. “Athletics is just in a whole 'nother budgetary universe. So every year, they lose more and more money. Every year, their expenses rise faster than their earned income, and they make up the difference by taxing students and sucking resources out of academics.

"I don’t think there’s any other way to describe it.”

CSU’s athletic budget for 2018-19 includes $9.4 million in athletic scholarships, which the department must pay directly to the admissions office. The other $40 million in scholarships the university provides students each year doesn’t go through departmental budgets, Miranda said, but is instead paid directly to the students through the financial aid office.

That is also a source of contention. Miranda, like CSU System Chancellor and former Fort Collins-campus President Tony Frank, insists the scholarship money paid back into the general fund when athletes pay their tuition and fees, should be deducted from the nearly $16 million in university support budgeted for athletics. Shulman, Meyer and others argue that money should be counted entirely as an expense, the way the NCAA — an intercollegiate athletics organization — counts it in its annual reports.

“The NCAA doesn’t have any reason to make those numbers look bigger than they are,” Meyer said.

As big as those numbers are, though, they’re only a tiny fraction of CSU’s annual operating budget, Miranda said.

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“We have a total budget of $1.3 billion, so this is like a half a percent of our total budget, that order of magnitude,” Miranda said. “We feel that the investment is appropriate, and we have a pretty good ROI (return on investment) on that as an institution. … With all the various activities that are involved in running a major university, this is not a part of the university that’s causing stresses in the academic world, which has a budget of $400 million or $500 million.”

With the Colorado Legislature in the middle of its budget-setting session, CSU is in the early stages of financial planning for the 2020-21 academic year. Whether CSU's change in leadership, or Faculty Council's resolution will impact the university's support for athletics won't be known until this summer.

Until then, the debate rages on.

Kelly Lyell covers CSU and other local sports and sports-related news for the Coloradoan. Contact him at kellylyell@coloradoan.com, follow him on Twitter @KellyLyell and find him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/KellyLyell.news. Help support Coloradoan journalists by purchasing a subscription today.