A few donors who weren't donating to the school, but were donating to a program that clearly isn't benefitting the school to the level that it's being funded at.
This is likely true but the money from any ESPN deals these schools are being reinvested in the programs (while still also dedicating general fund $ to the programs) and nothing is going back to the classrooms. P5s don't have that worry and while OU will always have the best or near best facilities for their athletic programs they still have kids living in the Couch Center which is probably 50 years old and 20 years over due on a major renovation all the while the OKLeg keeps reducing OU's budget allocations. I'm sure LaTech is experiencing a lot of the same as red states are continually reducing education expenditures at all levels while continuing to reduce taxes to score political points. I'm all for reducing taxes when appropriate and you can sustain a budget that supports everything that needs to be paid for.
Churches will frequently allow you to designate where your donations go be it the general fund, missions, youth, pastor's alms, etc. I don't know that the Catholic Church puts those options out there but it's been a long time. I think they may have special collections to fund different things (and I doubt legal defense fund is one). I know more evangelical churches do special, directed collections all the time. I'd like to know of those churches, especially the mega ones like Osteen's, if they disclose their budget and where the funds go. The Righteous Gemstones satires how much money these churches take in.
I understand this, but clearly it’s not an activity that is working for the students. It’s working for administrators and those donating but not actually students.
If the church was acting as it should then the donations would be directed appropriately. If you don’t trust your church to direct the funds appropriately then you’re donating to the wrong church. (Same goes for educational institutions)
I'm not disagreeing. We do see problems when money is given for a specific reason and carries another condition of "no athletic projects during this time"...which is usually more about the individual or foundation getting their moment in the sun instead of being overlooked because an IPF is being built from a different donation. You don't hear much about things like this but they're out there.
I recall one of our other illustrious posters saying that TU couldn't take the athletics money because we'd have too low of a percentage on academics and lose our accreditation and have to shut down and turn the keys over to whoever you turn the keys over to??
This really doesn't seem all that hard. You probably have generally different donor pools for academics and athletics and some who overlap. When you land a big athletics gift, you take it to your academics donors and say we have this great opportunity but want to make sure we have our priorities straight so want to match it with improvements on the academics/student life, whatever. It's an opportunity to take a different story to the donors who support things other than athletics. These are complementary opportunities, not conflicting. If TU is thinking about it as one or the other, then that definitely explains part of our issues.
I could argue it’s working (at least to some extent) for all those student athletes who rely on football revenue to fund their sports….at least at many schools. I could also argue we are talking about donations which likely would not be given to the academic side. I do have issues with college coaches making $8M a year. I’m not sure if I would argue these private athletic donations are working for the admins but they’re definitely working for the coaching staffs. I also don’t see any significant changes on the horizon with the TV and ticket revenue being generated by the big football schools.
Some blindly give because they fall trap to the "Prosperity gospel" and how it's been twisted by many evangelical pastors. I've been lucky enough to be part of a church that engages members in how funds are spent and my wife has been part of the trustee committee so she's been privy to the budgeting process. But they do take up collections for special projects and events but you're told about it and you don't feel guilted into giving to that specific collection.
What you really need to ask yourself is how much value does the average student athlete get from their degree. I would argue that many of them (due to the majors they’re forced to pursue due to time limitations) aren’t getting the value they should.
You forget that there are egos involved with all these donations and that's the primary problem.
I’m all for the church as a communal organization making strategic spending decisions by using the expertise of knowledgeable members. And if you or others believe that you have good ideas for where church (or institutional) funds should be spent then you should participate in organizations that help direct the spending rather than flat earmarking your dollars for X Y or Z. That goes for billionaires as well, but they need to also be met with calm minds. When they say “I want a new locker room” they should be shown pictures of delapidated classrooms or the budget sheets for professors who haven’t seen a raise in years. And it needs to be made clear across the US that academics come first rather than coming last.
I agree with you...but it simply isn't reality. Reality is a lot of donors to universities connect more with athletics than academics which is unfortunate as there always seems to be an us or them attitude without seeing they exist together and for each other. The real problem is places like OU, Texas, Ohio State, Alabama etc. where no one cares about the academics anymore. This is where the whole NIL has taken us...and soon my guess is the NCAA will do away with academic progress. They sort of did this a few years ago when they allowed UNC to do whatever it wanted by offering a class that didn't exist and enter an automatic A for the athletes who took it. The defense was "well, any student could have taken that class, not just athletes".
I believe once you get past the two revenue sports the average student athlete receives a great deal of value from their degree. We just tend to focus on football and basketball because those sports receive the vast amount of media exposure.
How much value are they actually receiving from their degree if the classrooms look like the picture above and we’ve already determined that some (if not a great portion) of the teaching staff isn’t paid appropriately?
"Extraordinary rendition" is the phrase we'll be thinking in a week when asked, "what happened to that noble cane guy?"
I suspect the glory days are coming to an end for our friends in Norman as it becomes more and more apparent that they don't have the donor network to compete with the, ahem, USCs, Texas A&Ms, Michigans, Georgias, etc. of the world. Eventually the pro university teams are going to have to agree on a salary cap of some sort or the group who can realistically compete will shrink even further.
I certainly saw some classrooms around TU that looked similar minus the roof leak but plus things like rotten linoleum, holes in the walls, etc… TU is somewhat of an outlier as it does put some more emphasis on academics than other places, but it’s wasn’t devoid of bad facilities either. KEP was bad when I was there in the late 2000’s. They did build the new engineering buildings that helped out quite a bit.
