(04-08-2018 04:57 PM)Attackcoog Wrote: [ -> ] (04-08-2018 04:13 PM)quo vadis Wrote: [ -> ] (04-08-2018 03:00 PM)Attackcoog Wrote: [ -> ] (04-08-2018 02:52 PM)quo vadis Wrote: [ -> ] (04-08-2018 11:37 AM)Ohio Poly Wrote: [ -> ]No one is forced to attend UC or any AAC school. So the fees are optional for all AAC students and they are opting in at a rate of 100%.
That is a strange way to look at it, because the student should not have his or her valid educational program options held hostage to a dumb athletic fee.
There are very few if any services that are not held "hostage" to some fee or built-in cost that the buyer may or may not prefer be there. If you consider sales taxes, virtually every transaction by definition is subsizing other programs that the buyer may not ever use or even support.
College is not different from the primary public education systems across the nation. Millions of dollars are spent on athletics in every school district---even though most middle and high schools students will never play a single sport. Those that have interests in the sciences still subsidize band, cheerleading, wresting, choir, and theatre, ect. Nothing new here.
Huh? High school kids don't pay a fee to fund the football or basketball teams. That funding comes from the school district. So the athletic fees at college are totally different.
Second, in high school, the regular students aren't paying fees to fund "scholarships" for the athletes. They aren't being asked to pay for their own tuition, PLUS pay a fee on top to help defray the cost of an athlete's tuition. Think about how dumb and unfair that is.
If college students are paying a fee to fund intramural athletics on campus, that is appropriate, as it provides a recreational benefit every student can participate in if they want to. Of course, those fees are nothing compared to the fees charged to fund the school's intercollegiate sports teams.
What do you mean. huh? High school students dont pay a fee period. They do pay taxes that support both the academic and athletic parts of the school district. Furthermore, those that attend private schools pay for the athletic programs as part of their tuition (as well as taxes to support a public school district they dont attend at all---talk about unfair). Bottom line---The cost of maintaining and running a modern primary public school district includes a cost for athletics. That money is not going to academics---which I assume is your argument at the university level. As far as college goes---If mandatory, the athletic fees are simply part of the cost of attendance---no different than building use fees.
My point is---we accept athletic spending that is not self supporting at the local school district level. Not sure why there should be an expectation that programs that are not self sustaining at the HS level will be at the college level.
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The reality is----if this issue is a priority with the student---the decision to attend a school with low or no athletic fee is completely and totally within their control.
First, there's a huge quantitative difference between HS students, whose "fees" for athletics takes the form of the taxes their parents pay, and the taxes everyone else in the school district pays even if they have no kids in school, and the specific tacked-on fees that we are talking about for G5 and FCS schools. The former are tiny and diffuse, probably pennies per student per year, the latter, significant.
E.g., in my district here in Baton Rouge, I pay about $150 a year in property taxes that go to fund public schools. That's for funding the entirety of the public school system, all aspects of it. The fraction of this that goes to buy uniforms for football players is probably a dollar or two at most. Contrast that with the hundreds of dollars a semester students at some colleges pay.
Second, there's a major qualitative difference as well. At colleges, regular students are soaked to actually fund the attendance of the athletes. E.g., at UConn, a student pays for their own tuition and books, and then is socked with a fee to help pay for an athlete's tuition and books. So regular students are incurring extra costs and debt to pay for free rides for other students. That doesn't happen in middle school.
Third, the "choice" argument is disingenuous, because it forces a student to make choices they shouldn't have to. A Houston or USF student who thinks their business or engineering program is the best fit for them shouldn't have to choose between that and paying an athletic fee, because athletics isn't a proper part of the mission of a university. It's a false-choice situation. Bad.
As for the comments about "self-sustaining": This is a damning indictment. At public grade and high schools, athletics is touted as fun, recreation activity for students, part of the Platonic ideal of developing mind and body. At colleges, intercollegiate athletics is supposed to BRING IN money. It's touted as an investment that pays off in marketing and other benefits for the university. Truth is, of course, at 90% of all FCS and FBS schools, it obviously costs way more than it brings in, which is why fees are needed. The claims about "front porch" and the like don't pan out, if they did, no fees would be needed.
I am happy to find out that USF's athletic fee is relatively low compared to some other G5 schools, but until it is down to zero, it's a bad thing.