(12-12-2019 06:16 PM)quo vadis Wrote: [ -> ] (12-12-2019 01:11 PM)teamvsn Wrote: [ -> ]SUNO has been a dumpster fire for years.
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Hopefully someone who has some financial sense will replace this interim Chancellor and not follow through on it.
You can't uncritically swallow data provided by the NAIA, when the NAIA of course has an interest in NAIA schools competing in the NAIA. And in any event, that data would only apply generally, not to the specific situation off every school.
Truth is, SUNO is in financially extreme circumstances. It suffered greatly from Katrina and from the Jindal-era budget cuts, and enrollment as a result has plunged. It's either cut athletics or cut academics, and they have already furloughed employees and cut pay on the academic side.
SUNO was put on probation in August by SACS due to finances, and they will be reviewed again in June. They do NOT have the luxury of making up nonsense about the "ancillary benefits" of athletics when they are hemorrhaging real red ink every day, and will be judged by SACS in six months on their actual, bottom line financial situation.
It is a sad day for SUNO, and as someone at SUBR who has colleagues there, I feel for them, but this is a necessary step.
OK, you know the situation on the ground much better than I do, and I was probably too hard on them. But you are being too hard on the NAIA, or simply don't grasp the numbers. If we can take the info in the article at face value, we have a rare opportunity to pencil out some real outcomes here.
SUNO's athletic budget is $795,918 according to the article. That bears out immediately the NAIA's claim that they have a low overhead approach. How many D2 - or even D3 - schools can claim an athletics budget of under $800k?
They have 56 athletes. I used SUNO's financial aid calculator and came up with a tuition, room and board figure of $14,670 per athlete. That's money that accrues pretty much completely to SUNO's bottom line, since the marginal cost of an additional student - assuming you already have the teaching, housing and meal capacity - is close to zero. Obviously that's not all coming from the athlete's pocket, most of it isn't for this demographic. But it doesn't matter to the institution WHOSE pocket it comes from whether it's a state contribution per student, Pell grant or other scholarship, or student tuition payment. That comes to $821,520.
The NAIA doesn't have scholarship minimums, so we can only guess how much in terms of athletics scholarships have been granted. Given their financial state and lack of competitiveness, it might be next to nothing. But it's worth noting that on this "back of the napkin" estimate, and without including ANY estimates for ticket sales and sponsorships, "break even" for the department would be to award $457 per student. Next to nothing, but it's NOT negative. They could eliminate any scholarships for a period of time, and the athletic department would be a net contributor to the budget of $25,600 plus ticket sales and sponsorships.
This does not include any of the intangibles such as loss of regular non-athlete students who want attending college athletic events to be a part of their college experience. And also doesn't include potential students who don't particularly care about athletics, but see the elimination of the program as signal that SUNO is in it's death throes.
But back to my central point: for a school of 2500 students they should have more sports and a couple of hundred student athletes. 200 student athletes would pencil out to $2,934,000 without scholarships. A $2.1 million dollar benefit. Adding m/w soccer, baseball and softball - maybe tennis to compete with national power Xavier LA - would have changed their fortunes completely. And that's without football, which the NAIA has calculated to accrue more than $900k per year in PROFIT alone, even with scholarships thrown in.
You'll notice I used the past tense above. Yes, it's probably too late to embark on an athletics expansion at this point. But it shows what other schools have done over the last 5 years to survive. And SUNO should have done.