(12-21-2020 11:09 AM)Itinerant Texan Wrote:  Bunch of malarkey. Fact: Tarleton now has over 14,000 total students enrolled in 2020, including both Stephenville and Ft. Worth campuses, undergrad and grad, and they all pay the athletic fee. I repeat: they all pay the athletic fee. This is all that matters.

Those are the actual numbers submitted by the school to the US Department of Education. Those are numbers used to determine federal dollars for things like student loans and other programs. You are required by law to submit the correct numbers and they must stand up to audit.

For standards are not so strict for publicity, such as school brochures and websites. For those you can include satellite campuses, part time students, such as housewives taking a single class in say knitting or yoga, and open University classes, even online. That is why many school's publicly displayed numbers are far higher than the actual full time undergraduate student body, which is what is important to determine the competitiveness of the school.

I was for example quite surprised to see how few full time students there are at New Mexico State's main campus. It's about half the brochure number. My school, San Jose State, does not have all those adjunct campuses and community classes you see at other schools, so our roughly 33,000 matches the 26,500 we report to the DoE when you add in the 6,500 graduate students. This also explains why NMSU has struggled to keep pace and has fallen to near the bottom of FBS in budget and financial support.

For D1 sports the actual undergrads are important because they are the ones paying the student fees which account for the bulk of the "revenue" supporting the program. San Jose State charging $400 a year to students will gather roughly 3.5x as much support money for athletics as Tarleton State will ($32 per unit is roughly $440 per FTE less than 1/3rd SJSU's budget support level). This has allowed SJSU to climb from roughly 110th in FBS budgets to about 85th, simply because they have the student body to absorb the growing costs, which schools that were ahead of them 10 years ago like Nevada, New Mexico State, Southern Miss and Louisiana Tech have fallen far behind them. The miracle of attrition.

That