Guest Blogger: Researching Student Fees
Last weekend Chadwick Diamond came closest to predicting the winner and final score for JMU’s game. As a result, he gets to be our guest blogger. Here is his examination of the student fees issue. Take it away Chadwick.
While I haven’t done a full search, I feel safe to say I’m in the minority of guest bloggers in that I’m a current student at Madison. Four weeks into my sophomore year, I can saw without a doubt that I will be a Duke for life. The one thing that has always bugged me though is student fees. Every student has to pay them, but does anybody really know what they go towards? Sports, libraries, on campus events are common answers, but for me that wasn’t enough. The most intriguing aspect, unsurprisingly, was how much was given to sports.
A simple google search for ‘jmu athletic revenue’ revealed this gem. On the fifth page is a line titled ‘Student Fees’. Sounds like what we’re looking. Football: Four million. Okay a little high, but not terrible. Total: 27.3 million. What! Twenty thousand students at JMU, and thats comes out to a whopping 1365 dollars per person. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love JMU and its sports, but I’m not sure if I would say its worth nearly fourteen hundred a year.
But wait. Maybe this amount is normal for schools to put on their students. As luck would have it USA Today put together a nice interactive table of the revenue and expenses of D-I schools from 2006 through 2011 here. Hey, you can even sort by total subsidy, which is just student fees plus ‘school funds’, which I’m just gonna count as the same thing. And JMU clocks in at… number five. Woah, can’t say I saw that coming. Playing around with the table some, I realized that Madison’s athletics budget of 31 million is more than any team in the MAC or the Sunbelt, and is number three in the CAA. I would have thought FBS schools as whole, and ones with the higher profile football programs especially, would have had much higher student fees, but instead it seems that the opposite is true and high level FCS programs and low level FBS programs have the highest rates of student fees. It seems that as you go up the football ladder the programs generate more money and thus have to rely less on student fees.
However, even within this framework Madison sticks out. Looking at the MAC, the average student fee was only 17.2 million. Now, this article is not supposed to focus on moving to the FBS, however comparisons must be made to understand how JMU has the fifth highest student fees in the nation among public schools. To get a broader view of revenue and expenses across the D-I landscape, I found a document published by the NCAA averaging a bunch of different athletic expenses and revenue sources. The pages of most interest to me were 30 and 56. Here the NCAA divides revenue into four quadrants of expenses. JMU’s generated revenue clocks in at 7.3 million. This is actually below the median for the upper quartile for FCS schools and about a million less than lower quartile FBS schools. What might be more interesting though is that in terms of the total revenue, including student fees, JMU is above the median for the lower quartile FBS schools.
I think this is the root of the problem. JMU generates below average money, but spends above average money. So what are some possible solutions to fixing this and lowering student fees? Well, you can either spend less or make more. Spending less is clearly not in the books, just take a look at Bridgeforth, University Park, and Memorial Park. That means we must find a way to make more money. One possible solution to this is to increase ticket revenue. As it stands now, Madison is actually making 2.3 million a year while the average lower quartile FBS school only makes 1.5 million. However, I believe this is likely because the low end schools perform poorly in the FBS and fans don’t come out, but JMU performs well in the FCS so fans do come out(would you rather watch a loss to Bowling Green or a win over Richmond?). As with most programs, the two revenue sports for college programs are football and men’s basketball. Bridgeforth currently rakes in 1.9 million and is near capacity most games, so the only way to increase revenue there is raising ticket prices. This obviously will not make fans happy. The other option then is men’s basketball.
To be brutally honest, the convo center is terrible. There isn’t a good student section, the announcement speakers are terrible, and most importantly it almost never fills up. This leaves a lot of room for improvement. Following the team’s successful run in the postseason last year, I believe there is a good chance we will see more fans show up when we have games this year. The when is another problem. The out of conference schedule this season only includes two games at home, which limits the amount of income further.
Another key source of revenue is alumni contributions. JMU does receive 2 million in donations, which is no small number and in line with similar programs. There is a slight problem with this though. Looking at a presentation put together by Taylor Schwalbach, Assistant Director of Annual Giving, found here you can see that only 7% of JMU alumni donate to the University. Compare this to William and Mary at 23% and UVa at 22% there is certainly room for improvement. This is not to say that everyone reading this should break out the benjamins, it is simply a statement of fact and there are likely many underlying factors affecting this.
One things many people point to as a source for more money is more tv money and conference payouts in the FBS. In researching this I found that to largely be incorrect. A table found here shows the payouts from television contracts in various conferences. As you can see, of the conferences Madison could reasonably get into, only CUSA offers anything close to a million per year. While I couldn’t find details on the new CAA bargain, I imagine it is around 50 to 100 thousand per school. Another problem facing Madison that they are spending 5.8 million in principal and interest on various loans for athletic facilities in 2013 alone and some of these payments will continue till 2030. For camparison’s sake, UVA pays 8.4 million in loans this year.
Back to the original question, how and why are student fee’s so high. Well, I really don’t have a concrete answer. Madison’s current financial situation is a classic catch 22. In order to make more money, they must spend more money. In order to spend more money, they must make more money.
For those of you that made it this far, thanks for reading! I hope this article was as interesting to read as it was for me to research. If I left something out on accident or you have any questions just post in the comments and I’ll try and answer you.
Good interesting stuff and and good research. A few points I wanted to make.
W&M and UVA have a lot more alumni in general, and older alumni specifically. I don’t remember the exact number, but a very high percentage (more than half) of ALL people who have EVER graduated from JMU have graduated in the past 20 or so years. As these folks get older and get to the point where they can start actually giving money I think you will see this number increase.
Another thing I want to touch on are the loans. I’m assuming those loans are for the football stadium expansion and the new sports facility on port road. Yes, the school probably had to take out some loans to do that stuff, but it’s was a smart time to do it. Interest rates are at historical lows and construction is/was cheap (cheaper) at the time much of that was done. Translation: it was a good time to build, you could get a lot of bang for your buck.
Finally: “JMU has the fifth highest student fees in the nation among public schools.” Counter: JMU is consistently ranked as on of the best value colleges in the Country. Student fees might be high, but the overall cost is still low.
As I understand, there’s a state law in Virginia that doesn’t allow athletics to be supported by tuition. So, Virginia schools are forced into calling it out as a separate fee. Schools in other states bury those costs in the tuition.
What isn’t mentioned is some schools may have lower student fees, but students have to pay for their tickets like Tech. 7 home games at let’s says 30 dollars a game is no small amount. And that’s just football. Also, throw out any of those 50 free t shirts we got every year, make our food worse, pay to use UREC and the Harrisonburg buses(Blacksburg and Chapel Hill you have to for two examples) and see if it doesn’t seem more reasonable. Not playing devils advocate, just adding a fee more numbers to the equation
It is useless to compare student fees across state lines. Each state has different ways of accounting for fees. In most states, these fees can be buried in tuition and hidden. In Virginia, student fees MUST be broken out and disclosed. That is why you see so many VA public colleges in the top 10% of student fees charged.
FYI
The only really relevant item touched on here was the amount of alumni giving back to the university. 7% is seven percent is pathetic. Of course I gave a few years worth of donations in parking tickets so I hope JMU stocked those a way for a rainy day.
Good read Chadwick. Definitely a tough subject. Fees are high. The bills are expensive, they are never going to get cheaper, and the state provides less and less each year while the university is asked to do more. Add to your expense list – UREC expansion beginning next spring – probably a ~$50M expansion and renovation to add to the student fees tab. New ~$90M Convocation center on the 5-year horizon. I don’t know the exact answer either but we do need to increase our alumni support.
Great job Chadwick and thanks for bringing up this topic. I particularly like that you didn’t just take a stick-in-the-mud “fees are too high” approach but instead presented some ideas for raising revenue, starting with the long-neglected hoops program and the alumni base.
As others have pointed out, it’s entirely possible Virginia public students are actually subsidizing athletics LESS than other states, it’s just that it has to be disclosed as part of the student fee instead of being buried and hidden in a tuition fee.
Additionally, one thing I’d be interested to know is how much other funding to the university for non-athletic items goes up or down depending on the shape of your athletics program. For example, cutting back on athletics would likely lead to less success, which as you correctly noted, in my case would lead to less interest. If we cut football for example, or just decided to spend less and suck at it, as an alum I would still give my general annual donation to JMU. But I wouldn’t be coming down for the golf tourney that’s usually tied to a football weekend that I’ve played in a few times to benefit the Madison Business Scholarship Fund (I’m not a COB guy). Or the fact that I became aware of the Madison Forever fund when it was being promoted at football games. Even made my first donation right there at a game when that program was first announced. Last year at the CAA tourney in Richmond some friends I wouldn’t otherwise have been seeing turned me on to a Bonfire fund they had started, also for Madison Forever, and I made a small, but immediate donation. Those are the reasons you hear some in the administration refer to athletics as the “front porch of the university.” Could easily be wrong (and I’m also sure there are some who might give more with a lower focus on athletics), but as someone who became an alum when JMU started having some sustained success at the FCS level in the 00’s, that’s what got me committed as a consistent donor. That worked cause I’m a big fan and even FCS success was enough for me, but I have a feeling home games against Wake Forest might be more the ticket for other alums not quite as big on FCS.
“I can saw without a doubt that I will be a Duke for life.”
Yep, in the upper 20th percentile of his graduating class.
Somewhat buried in this post is how Title IX is skewing how much schools spend on athletics. Athletics and their associated fees would be so much cheaper if schools weren’t forced to pay millions for sports no one wants to watch.
@hi – BRAVO for pointing out (one of the) problem(s) with title IX.
As far as student fees go, most students don’t pay them anyway…. mom and dad do. They also pay tuition. So whatever.
I’m wondering how much the spending numbers are skewed because of recent construction. Usually those numbers are a couple years old because they’re obtained through public record, so when you’re looking at spending in 2013, you’re actually looking at the spending from 2010 or 2011. If you recall what was being built in those two years, it was… well, everything. The $64 million dollar Bridgeforth renovation, UPark was in the early stages, which was a few more million… Just some context on that figure.
Like LD said, the biggest problem here isn’t the student fee thing– their amorphous presence is a problem at every university, and no one actually knows what they do– it’s the annual giving number. It IS low because JMU’s alumni pool is so young relative to other Universities like UVA, but it doesn’t make the paltry annual giving numbers any easier to swallow.
One last thing: I had a beer with Taylor Schwalbach the other day. He will be highly entertained that he was referenced here, so I’m passing along his thanks and amusement in advance.
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