It also provides low-income youth an opportunity to get a college degree, and incentivizes kids from low-income communities to stay off the streets and focus on something productive (like sports).
Collegiate sports teams are effectively the same as student tutors, student RAs, student librarians, or any other school-sponsored jobs that hire students. One could argue that they're even superior at schools like Alabama because they provide even more money to be used on scholarships.
Alabama could take away their football program, but they would 1) take away scholarship money from the 30-50 low-income scholarship athletes, 2) take away money that could be reinvested into buildings, facilities, teachers, or academic scholarships, and 3) reduce alumni donations (because unhappy alumni don't donate), which further reduces the funds available to the school.
It's one thing if a school has sports programs that aren't a net gain for the university. But for the schools where it is, any talk of them removing the funding is absurdly ignorant.
It provides a small number of low-income youth, specifically football players.
Collegiate sports teams are not like other school-sponsored jobs. Student librarians cannot make millions of dollars if they plied their librarian skills on the open market. At least some college football players could. Student librarians don't face high risk of physical injury, disability, or long term health effects as part of their job. College football players do.
Pulling in 100m in revenue to supply 50 scholarships doesn't seem like the right tag line.
Also see below, most college sports revenue does not get pushed back into general academics.
Most alumni donations are to the university's athletic association - that's because those donations comes with the perks that alumni want - seats, being wined and dine, shaking the coach's hand, etc.
Talk of removing funding is absurd because its a system that's been this way for a long time - of course it would seem absurb to change it.
Perhaps there are other ways of making money for the university, which are better aligned with the purpose of academia? One such example is cooperation on research projects with the industry (which actually works pretty well), but I am sure there are other ideas.
This isn't true, most football programs have single digit percentages of their revenue being redirected back to academic programs and most of that is earmarked for scholarships for ...student athletes.[1]
The idea that football programs generate substantial revenue that improves academics for the entire university is not true.
Because if a sports program brings in $100m of revenue and a school has 50k kids, that's only about $2,000 per student. Tack off the sports costs and you're looking at maybe $1,000 extra per student, but instead of offering discounts, they may 1) invest in their trust fund for future growth, 2) pay down their debts to reduce the lifetime interest payments and save money down the road, 3) Roll the money up into more scholarships or 4) invest in infrastructure. None of those things directly lower the immediate cost for other students, but add tangible value to students and the institution.
