Syracuse Athletics Department Self-Sufficient No More
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Syracuse University is raising tuition to help pay a $2.5 million subsidy to its once self-sufficient athletic department, a first for the 134-year-old school.
The university is raising tuition 6.4% for its roughly 10,000 undergrads, instead of 6% as initially planned, to contribute $450,000 toward intercollegiate sports, former Chancellor Kenneth Shaw said in an interview before he retired August 1. That extra increase works out to about $100 per student.
The decision – sparked by the defections of football powerhouses Miami and Virginia Tech from the Big East Conference – has some parents, faculty, and one of the school’s most famous athletes questioning whether the administration values balls more than books.
“Raising tuition? That’s crazy,” said Carmelo Anthony, who led Syracuse to its first men’s basketball championship in 2003 and now plays for the National Basketball Association’s Denver Nuggets. “People are struggling out there, so it’s not right.”
The departures of five-time national champion Miami and Virginia Tech will cost the conference at least $5 million a year in television money, said Jed Corenthal, former marketing director for the National Football League who now is a sports television consultant in Weston, Conn.
The departures are the main reason the athletic department needs the subsidy because revenue from football will decline, Mr. Shaw said in a telephone interview. Undergraduate tuition at Syracuse was $24,172 last year.
The Big East had been getting about $15 million a year from Walt Disney Co.’s ABC and ESPN to broadcast the conference’s games. The networks contend the contests aren’t worth as much without fifth-ranked Miami and Virginia Tech. An arbitrator will determine the reworked contract.
“I would say it would definitely go less than $10 million a year without Miami,” Mr. Corenthal said.
In May, Disney signed a seven-year TV agreement with the revamped ACC worth about $40 million a year – double the conference’s previous contract.
Syracuse’s subsidy to support sports isn’t unusual, Mr. Shaw said. Only 30-orso Division I-A schools – the highest tier in college sports – don’t assist their athletic departments financially, he said. For example, the University of Delaware, which won the championship for second-tier football schools last season, gives its Fighting Blue Hens teams about $10 million a year, according to the school budget.
That doesn’t make Syracuse’s decision to help its sports teams any easier for some parents to accept.
“It bothers me that my home equity loan is going toward athletics,” said 59-year-old Harry Stanton of Westchester County, New York, who has two daughters at the school. “I thought I was paying tuition for academic purposes.”
Other schools in the Big East are reacting differently from Syracuse to the decline in TV money.
West Virginia University, which unlike Syracuse is state-sponsored, won’t give its sports teams any help paying its bills, athletic department spokeswoman Shelly Poe said.
“The onus is on us,” Ms. Poe said.
University of Pittsburgh spokesman Robert Hill declined to comment. John Wooding, a spokesman for Rutgers, a state school in New Brunswick, N.J., said he wasn’t aware of any subsidies from the university.
West Virginia, along with fellow Big East schools Connecticut, Pittsburgh, and Rutgers, in October sued the ACC, Boston College, and Miami, alleging a conspiracy to switch leagues.
Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal filed suit on behalf of the University of Connecticut, which spent more than $100 million on its new football stadium in advance of joining the Big East this season.
“Clearly, the harm has been severe and far-reaching, even if it differs from one school to another,” Mr. Blumenthal said in a telephone interview.
Miami President Donna Shalala, a former U.S. secretary of health & human services, said the school’s sports-related revenue would decline in the ACC. Unlike the Big East, which pays bonuses to successful football teams, the ACC splits the revenue from bowl games evenly among members, she said.
Miami switched conferences to help sports such as baseball and tennis, which didn’t compete in the Big East, Ms. Shalala said. It also makes sense from a travel perspective, as most ACC schools are in the southeast. The Big East is centered in the northeast.
ACC Commissioner John Swofford didn’t return a message.
While parents like Mr. Stanton are skeptical, others see benefit. Micah Green, who has a son in his senior year at Syracuse, says success in sports boosts a school’s prestige.
“Until Patrick Ewing, people around the country didn’t know about Georgetown,” said the 47-year-old Mr. Green, president of the New York-based Bond Market Association. “The basketball championship was not only an awesome experience for my son, but it allows Syracuse to attract better students and better faculty.”
Nahmin Horwitz, a professor of physics at Syracuse and a member of the faculty senate, said good linebackers don’t necessarily lure good learners.
“It’s true that Syracuse gets publicity when its teams win,” Mr. Horwitz said. “I’m just not sure that brings us the students that we really want to attract.”
Syracuse will review the athletic subsidy each year. For now, the football team is trying to recover from Sunday’s 51-0 season-opening loss at Purdue University. Syracuse will play at the University of Buffalo on Saturday.
“I love football, but you have to wonder,” said Mr. Stanton. “It eats up so many resources.”