As costs accelerate in college athletics one refrain we hear time and time again is that students will inevitably bear these costs. Now we could all just say that money is fungable, hang our heads down, and move on. But I wanted to dig into it a bit more. How much are students actually paying for athletics and who (if anyone) is being transparent about it?
Student Fee totals - what athletic departments report in student fee revenues?
Per Student - looking at what costs individual students will face
Balloons - a small swerve into the world of balloon costs
Pour a drink. Get comfortable. Let’s get into it.
If you’re not subscribed already, please click subscribe below to get NILnomics in your mailbox each and every week - it’s free!
Housekeeping: 300 subscriber celebration & holidays
Just a quick reminder that to celebrate 300 subscribers to the newsletter I’m doing a live Q&A on Youtube tonight (12/23 @ 9pm EST). If you have questions or a project you’d like to throw my way, please respond to this email and I’ll likely feature it! If you can’t watch live, it will be available to watch later on the channel.
This will be the last issue of 2025. I’m going to take next week off and may do a “Best of 2025” the first week of January. Lots of things cooking for 2026 - stay tuned!
Student Fees
The most straightforward way to understand how much students are paying in fees to support college athletics is to see what the schools themselves report. Item #3 in the annual NCAA MFRS report describes the student fees category as: “student fees assessed and restricted for support of intercollegiate athletics.” Let’s look at what schools report in student fees, courtesy of the Knight Newhouse Commission:
Quick Takeaways:
The schools charging the most fees for their students are not the cream of the crop of college football. Old Dominion, UCF, Charlotte, and Florida International - the schools with the 4 highest amounts of student fee revenue - aren’t perennial contenders for national titles.
I’m more interested by what schools you don’t see on this chart. No Michigan, Ohio State, Alabama, Clemson, or LSU. Clearly the top programs in college football don’t feel the need to charge students directly for their athletics programs.
23 schools make over $10 million annually off of student fees. That’s a lot! Conversely, 9 schools make less than a million annually - why bother?
Analyst’s Desk
Data comes from the Knight-Newhouse College Athletics Database. I’ve highlighted which schools ended in the top 25 of the CFP/AP poll for the 2025 season. Yes, the timing is off as the institutional data is for FY 24 but just go with it.
Digging in
This is where the analysis becomes more interesting. I used two approaches to estimate how much individual students are charged in athletics-related fees.
The first method divides each institution’s reported student fee revenue by its number of full-time undergraduate students. That estimate appears in the chart below as “Calculated Athletic Fee.”
The second approach involved reviewing each institution individually and searching its website for any explicitly stated athletics-specific fee. Many schools assess a general “mandatory fee” that is later allocated—often opaquely—across campus units, including athletics. I was specifically interested in institutions that clearly disclose an athletics fee to students.
Some schools are, in fact, quite transparent about what students are charged to support athletics. Those values appear in the chart below as “Published Athletic Fee.” Where transparency is lacking, the contrast is noticeable: several institutions report student fee revenue that implies a substantial athletics charge, yet publish no athletics-specific fee at all.
For those inclined to dig deeper, the underlying dataset I developed includes how institutions describe these fees in their own words. Some of the language is, frankly, striking. For example, the University at Buffalo describes its athletics fee as follows:
“The Intercollegiate Athletics component is vital to the university community’s strong commitment to and support for intercollegiate athletics. UB has a long and proud history of participating in intercollegiate athletics, dating back to the late 1800s. The Athletics Component facilitates greater student involvement. It enhances the quality of student life and increases opportunities for student interaction with peers from other institutions. It also puts UB in the national spotlight, which helps recruit and retain students along with development efforts.”
One additional benefit of a transparent athletics fee is that, at many institutions, students have the ability to vote on increases or decreases. Interestingly, these votes do not always align with program resources or competitive success. Well-resourced programs like North Texas have seen fee increases rejected by students, while lower-resourced programs such as Louisiana–Monroe have received student approval for higher fees.
It is a useful reminder that student perceptions—and priorities—do not always follow the balance sheet.
Onto the chart.
Quick Takeaways:
James Madison may deserve an issue of the newsletter unto itself. Needless to say that pushing into FBS football and making it to the CFP this year didn’t come cheap - they have the highest athletics student fee in FBS.
Not sure how to understand the 9 schools that have published athletics fees but none reported. This could be a timing issue as, again, the data on student fees is for FY 2024 and the published athletics fees is on institutional websites now.
In comparison, there are 39 schools with reported athletics fees but not published on their website. Again, this could be a timing issue. But seems more likely that schools are doing some back door accounting to fund their athletic departments.
It surprises me a bit that there are only 9 schools that charge over $1,000/year for athletics. I would have expected more given how much schools complain about how broke they are.
Analyst’s Desk
Calculated athletic fee is the reported student revenue amounts divided by the number of full-time undergraduates for the 2024-25 academic year per IPEDS. To get the published athletic fee, I searched each institutional website to see if any athletic specific fees were mentioned. Amounts are for full-time students over an academic year.
FBS and Balloons 🎈
If you aren’t constantly plugged into online college athletics discourse, you may have missed a brief moment when the internet fixated on a surprisingly narrow question: how much athletic departments spend on balloons.
One of the best newsletters in the college sports space, FOIABall, took the question seriously and dug in. Through a series of public records requests, they documented balloon-related spending across athletic departments. The only thing missing from their reporting, as their Editor-in-Chief David noted, was a clear visual to put the numbers in context.
That’s where I stepped in.
Quick Takeaways:
Everything is bigger in Texas amiright?
As much as I love seeing these entire budgets, the details and anecdotes that would come out of diving into an itemized budget have to be worth their weight in gold.
Analyst’s Desk
David put all the schools that had responded to his public records request after a few weeks into his post. Some schools delineate that the funds are for the whole athletic department rather than just the football team.
🔉 What I’m Listening To 🔉
I’m always on the lookout for anyone breaking down college sports and especially the business side of the industry. Here’s this week’s best listens:
Higher Ed Athletics - Travis sits down with NIU’s Athletic Director Sean Frazier, who spills the tea on why they left the MAC and other issues in college athlertics.
Moneyballers - Delaware’s basketball GM Jason Gandhi talks about his role and the proliferation of GMs across college athletics. His school’s move up to FBS is also explored.
NIL Clubhouse - the guys speak to Big East Commissioner Val Ackerman and 42U Co-Founder Stephen Bienko.
NACMA Podcast - West Virginia’s Erin Gibson speaks about her career and the impact of marketing in the college athletics landscape.
Sportswise - Gabe speaks with NCAA President Charlie Baker to pick his brain on everything college sports.
Trustees and Presidents - the President of University of San Diego gives his perspective on college athletics and his proposal to fix it. Specifically, letting football go out on its own.
Final Thoughts
Thanks for reading this week’s issue.
I’ll be honest that this week’s issue was inspired by an old NBC article on the same topic from 2020. Similar trends were observed there. I may have to make a longitudinal dataset with that article’s data. If you enjoyed this week’s issue, let me know by email. Thanks again for your time. Now finish your beverage 😀
Until next time,
Greg Chick, PhD
Data Analyst
📩 Know someone who cares about the future of college sports? Forward this email or share the subscription link.
💬 Got feedback or a topic you want me to cover? Reply to this email - I read everything!
💻 The NILnomics website is your home for all NILnomics content.
⌨ R code is available at my GitHub here.
NILnomics is an independent data-driven newsletter uncovering the real numbers behind college sports finances with sharp insights, clear visuals, and exclusive datasets. Please send any thoughts, questions, or feedback to me at [email protected] and please follow me on X @NILnomics. Don’t forget all our data is available on Kaggle, code on GitHub, and FOIA documents on GoogleDrive. See you next week!