Student Fees and Direct Institutional Support

When it comes to where athletic departments receive their operating funds, there’s a wide range of sources, two of which we’ve shown would drastically impact whether or not departments operate in the black. Let’s take a closer look at those two institution-based sources, Student Fees and Direct Institutional Support. ¹

We studied 220 different institutions, broken roughly into three categories – institutions with D1-A football teams (102), institutions with D1-AA football teams (72), and institutions without football teams (46). ² We chose this breakdown because there’s a natural gap in revenue between D1-A and D1-AA teams, and a natural gap in expenses between football and non-football fielding institutions. Here’s what we found:

As you can see, there was a major spike in both categories between 2011 and 2012. This increase can be seen in the amount of funding from those sources as well.

For the 102 D1-A institutions studied, those Student Fee averages totaled $83M in 2009 and $404M in 2012, while for the 72 D1-AA institutions studied the increase was from $67M to $198M. For the 46 non-Football schools studied, the increase was from $42M to $134M over the four year span.

The Direct Institutional Support had been higher than Student Fees received in the earlier years, especially in D1-AA, whose athletic departments receive less revenue from other sources but have to support a football program. In D1-AA, the increase went from $133M in 2009, to $226M in 2012, while in D1-A the increase was from $153M to $368M. For the non-Football schools studied, the increase was from $67M to $115M over the four year span.

70 institutions that hadn’t received any Student Fee money on athletics from 2009-2011 started receiving revenue from that source in 2012, and 22 (of the 70) started receiving Direct Institutional Support in 2012 as well. These Student Fee revenues totaled over $363M, and averaged $5.2M per athletic department, with a low of $31,846 (Florida) and a high of $17.8M (Georgia State).

At the same time, 55 of the 220 institutions studied (25%) have never directed Student Fee money to the Athletic Department. Most of these schools are in D1-A, understandable because those schools pull in the most external revenue by a wide margin.

Interestingly, when we examine how much of a percentage of total budget Student Fees and Direct Institutional Support account for, the numbers remain relatively unchanged across all three divisions from 2009-12, not showing the same spike between 2011 & 2012.

This is because while the revenues in those areas have increased dramatically, the expenditures have as well – teams are just investing that revenue back into their programs, rather than stocking it in rainy-day funds. Of the $363 million that the 70 teams taking Student Fee revenue for the first time in 2012 added, those teams increased their budget by an average of 70%.