Missouri Tigers: Public college athletic programs dealing with state budget cuts
A $36 million drop in funding from the state of Missouri is affecting athletics at all of the state’s public institutions of higher education, from Northwest Missouri State all the way up to Mizzou.
As part of a $251 million overall reduction in spending, Jefferson City has reduced the amount of money it is sending to the state’s several public colleges and universities. What that means for fans of these Missouri public college athletic programs, and the personnel involved with them, are a wide array of changes.
According to Alec McChesney, Blair Kerkoff and Tod Palmer of the Kansas City Star, cuts to athletics that have already been announced include but are not limited to the following:
- UMKC has nixed its cheerleading program and eliminated five full-time positions in the athletics department
- Missouri State replaced its field hockey team with a beach volleyball program, cut scholarships in non-revenue sports, and reduced grant in aid for fifth-year seniors
- Missouri Southern put the kibosh on its dance program
- Mizzou declined to fill an open position and cut two other full-time jobs in its athletic department along with reducing funding for technology programs for students
- Central Missouri has pressed coaches to use non-scholarship walk-on athletes to fill their rosters.
To be clear, the state government hasn’t imposed these specific cuts on the athletic programs at the various schools. These decisions were made by the officials employed by the schools in response to the cuts made by Jefferson City. College athletics are a business. They have to be ran as such. If revenue declines, business operators are forced to look at which programs and/or staff are least necessary to operations, and then make the painful decisions.
The fact that budget cuts to colleges and universities by the state government means a reduction to those schools’ athletic programs reveals a facet to our culture in the United States that is controversial. It shows just how interweaved higher education and sports have become. Missourians, like people in every other state, are subsidizing college athletics.
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Obviously, that subsidization isn’t happening to the degree of providing all the funding for the athletics programs at the various schools. Apparently, however, the several athletic departments do depend on funding from the connected schools which is provided by the state’s taxpayers to a significant degree. If that wasn’t the case, then one of two things must be true: either these cuts wouldn’t have been necessary, or these cuts were planned anyway and the state budget cuts just provided a convenient reason. The former scenario is more likely to be true than the latter.
Running an athletic department at a public college and/or university carries with it more concerns than just how to pay the bills, however. There are federal and state regulations, like Title IX, which govern how the athletic departments spend their revenue. When it comes to trimming the fat, it’s not as simple for these businesses as it is for a t-shirt company.
In an ideal world, the checks wouldn’t be written out of the schools’ general funds to the athletic departments. The money would be flowing the opposite direction. If the athletic department needs to make cuts, scholarships for athletes who have sacrificed their energy and time for the school or a reduction in technology for students looking to compete in a marketplace increasingly dependent on technology shouldn’t be where those cuts come. Academics, not athletics, must be the priority.
If a school’s athletics program isn’t not only making money for the school while abiding by regulations but also not in and of itself financially solvent, perhaps it’s time to challenge the cultural norm that marries athletics and colleges. More plainly stated, if a college’s athletics program isn’t helping pay the bills, it needs to be scrapped altogether.
Imagine a school focusing all of its resources on academics. What a concept.