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Student tuition
- Thread starter ZandiBuff
- Start date
You're arguing with people on a subject you don't understand?
Who is Howich? Are they a witch from a Blaxploitation film? A misunderstood female with a serious disposition?
It’s an AllBuffs tradition!
I think the crux of any misunderstanding may be that NIL money doesn't, and to my understanding can't, come from the schools. NIL sponsorship comes from 3rd parties (e.g. corps or non-profits looking to use an athletes endorsement for publicity).
I doubt sincerely that all the loopholes have been discovered at this point, but there should be no impact to tuition. University AD and general funds, to my knowledge, can't be used to directly sponsor NIL deals.
The debate in general is about those two subjects - not NIL paying for tuition.
My understanding is that the AD pays full tuition (and I thought it was all out of state) to the university for each student athlete on scholarship. I cannot find any actual reference for that, however.
Howich is what my phone thought I meant to type instead of "how it"
The athletic department pays out of state tuition on every athlete regardless of state status.
I have read that numerous times and have never seen the math to back that up or any statement from the AD as to the validity of that. I have also read that the AD pays the respective in-state or out-of-state tuition for each student, or alternatively the AD pays the true-cost of attendance which is somewhere in between.
Maybe ask Brian or Adam if you want something in writing?
this is from the CU scholarships page
if the top end of CU scholarships are $15k, that means there are no full ride OOS scholarships. Assuming the information is correct (I would struggle to question the credibility of this source), the only conclusion I can come to is that all athletic scholarships are at the in-state rate.
if the top end of CU scholarships are $15k, that means there are no full ride OOS scholarships. Assuming the information is correct (I would struggle to question the credibility of this source), the only conclusion I can come to is that all athletic scholarships are at the in-state rate.
One would have to get managerial level internal accounting documents from the university to find out the information. Maybe state level FOIA laws would allow one to do it, but the university would be unlikely to just hand them over without a fight.
And... here's the big thing: in a vacuum it wouldn't tell you much. Even if you had some expert accountants to make sense of them for you.
You would also need the same level of information about other departments at CU to find out if the AD is getting disproportionate charges for central/administrative services (IT, facilities, etc). Plus you would again need the same information from a couple peer institutions to see if they're doing it differently.
The thing with managerial accounting type things (especially how and how much you charge for centrally provided services, or just goods/services that one department provides to another) is that there are several different ways to do things, and drum roll: they're all "right" in the sense that an auditor will easily approve them because they meet standard accounting guidelines - even though they can all result in wildly different cost allocations.
Take something as straightforward as IT services (not hardware, just services). You could just budget a certain amount off the top for IT services for the entire campus, and not even bother to allocate that cost between departments - it's all lumped into some administrative campus services budget line. That would be a "correct" way of doing it. Or you could allocate the costs between the various departments, and that would also be a "correct" way of doing it. You could also say "the university cannot subsidize the AD at all, so we're not going to allocate those expenses to any department other than the AD - they have to 'pay their way,'" and that would be another "correct" way of doing it.
But even once you decide to allocate (or not allocate, or partially allocate) those expenses what formula you use can vary. It could be a "per user" cost. It could be a "per employee" cost. It could even be an "allocate by total payroll costs." There a variety of formulas you could use, and all of those allocations could be "correct."
HR admin costs are another one of those centrally managed things, the costs of which can be allocated, or not allocated, or partially allocated. And they can be allocated by a variety of different formulas (again, per person, per hiring action, per background check, by salary, etc, etc).
Every one of those internal, seeming vacuous, boring and overly bureaucratic accounting/budgeting decisions can result in the AD paying disproportionately more (or less) than other campus departments or peer institution ADs for the same services.
Because those specific numbers are often hidden behind layers of bureaucracy, we tend to only see the results. And the results are a CU AD that is always more cash strapped than peer institutions with the same (or even lower!) top line budget numbers.
Which tells me that the upper level university administration at CU is consistently making "correct" accounting decisions that are resulting in our AD paying more for similar goods/services than peer ADs.
The other institutions are not "cheating" - they are making equally correct accounting decisions, but their correct decisions are not hamstringing their ADs.
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Perhaps the AD wants it this way in order to drive more donations. Pleading poverty is the easy answer for asking for more donations or raising prices. You made the point better than I did, which is for all the bitching and moaning about what the AD "pays" the university is just nonsense because it is just accounting, no dollars actually get paid.
The bottom line is how much does the AD take in with donations and revenue and how much do they spend on salaries, overhead, plant, and equipment. The rest is fungible.
I would guarantee the University knows exactly how much they get from the AD and how much it costs to house/educate those 300ish athletes. The University isn't losing money on this deal.
No - the dollars do actually get paid. The AD does get actual dollars from ticket sales, and the conference, and sponsorships, donations, stadium food and beverage sales, etc, etc.
Some of those dollars get paid to the university for tuition, room, board, for student athletes.
Some of those dollars get paid to the university for services provided by central elements of the university to the AD.
Both of those actual, real, dollars that get paid to the university can vary based on managerial accounting decisions that are made at the administrative level, and that are generally going to be opaque to the outside world - except in the results we see, where the AD always seems to have less cash than other similarly situated ADs.
I figured all the actual money went to central accounting, just like all donations flow through the CU Foundation. I would think it would be inefficient for the AD to have its own accounts receivable and payable departments that actually take and deposit funds and then cut checks to the University. I assumed all funds are sent to central accounting and the disposition to the various departments would then be backend accounting transfers. Wouldn't they need PO's, invoices, and all sorts of other paperwork then to accompany every transaction between the AD and the University?
You're right. The point I'm making is that the "accounting numbers" really do represent real dollars. They aren't some imaginary numbers on ledgers.
While it's true that when the university "charges" the AD some dollar amount for some internal service that no actual cash changes hands, it is also true that when the university charges the AD some dollar amount for some internal service that it is, in fact, one less dollar that the AD can spend on coaches or players.
Bottom line is that these internal accounting policies can result in ADs having more or less money to spend on coaches, recruiting infrastructure, etc, etc. And when we look at the resulting budgets of CU's AD vs ADs at other universities, for some reason similarly situated ADs (who have the same sort of internal accounting systems) always seem to have more money available.
The difference has to be something we can't see - so yeah, what the internal charges are for services provided by various parts of the university to the AD is one of the few things we can't see at all.
Bottom line is that only the CU AD took out the covid loan from the pac 12. All the other ADs went "nah, we're good."
And this is only the latest in a long line of examples of the CU AD being much more "poor" that its peers.
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We use the term scholarship but athletes are actually not on a "scholarship" which is a term that refers to money provided based on academic performance or expectations.
Athletes receive a financial grant in exchange for participation in a sport or sports. They may have minimum academic performance requirements built in but are granted based on the athletes expected participation in the designated sport.
University academic scholarships are administered by the financial aid office while athletic grants are administered by the athletic department (although funds may be routed through the financial aid office.)
Ok, i feel f ucking stupid.
I read that athletic scholarships were managed at CU entirely different than needs and academic scholarships, But I've been following college sports for decades, and always understood athletic scholarships to be a type of scholarship, not a grant. I honestly had no idea use of 'scholarship' for athletes was only an idiom and not a literal use of the term.
I'm typically not ashamed of discovering my ignorance and learning new things but this one has me really disappointed in myself. I should probably quit posting on college sports forums. I clearly have no clue how any of this works.
Thanks for politely filling me in.
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Played by Pam Greer right?