Utah athletics revenues tops $126M in 2023 for another record setting year! And as always, Utah finishes with a surplus of $2M in profits thanks to the fiscally responsible approach Dr Chris Hill put in place many years ago and has been continued by Mark Harlan. Utah continues to win on the field and in the back office thanks to sound leadership. The only year Utah has not finished in the black was the Covid year.
Utah booked record revenue last year and once again ended with a surplus when campus support is included in the bottom linehttps://t.co/mb3NSjENwb
— Jon Wilner (@wilnerhotline) April 18, 2024
But this line is, and always be, problematic:
“once again ended with a surplus when campus support is included in the bottom line.”
That means that it ended in the “black” through the use of tuition and mandatory activity fee dollars generated from all students. In fact, from research I’ve done, only 1.4 percent of all intercollegiate athletic programs generated more revenues than expenses during the last couple of years. As you can probably guess, Utah is not one of those 1.4 percenters.
And does it count Utah’s portion of the Comcast payment that is still owed?
I assume the years looked at included the Covid year. I believe the athletic department reported a $20-25 million difference between revenue and expenses, but offset that loss with monies from reserves.
Every public institution operates in a similar way, charging “student fees” that gets routed to Athletics for such things as student section tickets to all athletic home events. And these fees are part of the annual budget every year that athletic departments know going into the year how much will be coming from this line item in the budget. Utah allocates expenses in the annual budget accordingly, knowing what they have forecasted to come in from a revenue perspective and is fiscally responsible to not exceed its annual expenses but to always conservatively fall short of its forecasted revenue. This is how Utah has built up its “rainy day fund” for the athletic department, which helped a lot when every athletic department in the country got slammed during the Covid year.
What Utah Athletics does NOT do is spend away all year long and then at the end of the year figure out what the gap is that needs to get covered and then goes to the University to tack on the corresponding amount of “student fees” needed to arrive at their desired number. It’s the other way around. The athletics department has always operated with an attention to being fiscally responsible and that’s something we can all be proud of. I know our jealous little brothers down South like to try and tell everyone otherwise, but they’ve always tried to make up their own facts to fit their narrative when it comes to all things U of U.
I’m not disagreeing with you on the method but just pointing out the fact that the program isn’t truly self funding and students have zero recourse to opt out on those student fees. Think about it…you could be a 45 year old doctoral student from Madagascar and still have to pay fees supporting sports you don’t follow or even understand. All universities charge student fees in the same manner because they know that, if students were given the option, the vast majority would opt out leaving athletics in the red forevermore.
Understood. My point is that Utah isn’t doing something unique. The overwhelming majority of public institutions all do it in a similar way.
Edit: one other thing that’s worth mentioning is although the $ amount of “student fees” varies that gets collected by Public universities across the country…comparing merely on this basis isn’t a fair comparison. It’s kind of like people who compare and gripe about different state taxes. All states have to collect enough revenues to function. Some, like Florida or Nevada, have chosen to entice people to their state through $0 of state income taxes. But you can’t operate an entire state with $0 of government revenues to provide your people with all of its necessary services to function. So they have to then go and collect those funds in other areas. Higher property and sales taxes, toll roads etc. At the end of the day, even with the mandatory “student fees” the U of U collects, the overall cost of an education at U of U is much lower than its peer schools (PAC 12 and now B12).
Here’s a ranking of (public) Big 12 + PAC12 most to least in terms of institutional/student support in 2023
List obviously doesn’t include Baylor, BYU, Stanford, USC, TCU as private schools that don’t have to report this….but that doesn’t mean they don’t do this – it’s just more obscured because they don’t have to break the fees out openly. BYU (as an example) no longer releases the data (as far as I can find), but they did in 2016-2019. In each of those years about 14% of their revenue (~$10M) came from “Tuition Allocation”…aka money taken from student tuition and given to the athletic department. Not sure if that’ll continue with more Big 12 revenue for them
Thanks for the information…I didn’t think that Utah was providing so much assistance but it’s shocking to see the costs that other schools are bearing.
Of course that doesn’t tell the whole story. If you take less money from the institution but then run a deficit, someone (probably the institution) still has to cover it. So here’s a ranking of the same schools by net athletics revenue minus net expenses
Which means you can calculate out how much net ‘profit’ each athletic department had if you DON’T include institutional support and student fees
So Utah is right at the median there. Not terrible (see UCLA, UCF, Colorado, Cal, Cincy, Arizona, Houston, ASU)…but also not great (see Kansas St, Texas Tech, Oregon, Kansas, Oklahoma St, and obviously Texas – maybe even include Iowa St).
The above also pretty clearly shows the issues with mismanagement in the PAC vs the Big 12 and probably points to why the former broke up and the latter still exists
No, this is not how you should look at this. Guaranteed if Utah didn’t build in their current “student fees” to enrollment (meaning they took $0 from student fees) Utah would still run their budget to come in at the same amount of profit…around $2M/year. They’d just have less money to work with. Keep in mind that when Utah left the Mt West Conference, the entire athletic department’s budget was $30M. Chris Hill ran the budget the same way back then as it continued to grow YoY with P5 money…fiscally responsible so that Utah was always making sure they were spending a couple $M less than they were bringing in and putting a small profit into their rainy day fund each year.
But one of the things Hill also did was benchmark everything they were doing against peer schools. Keep in mind that there is now a bigger draw to attending Utah because it is/was a PAC 12 school with P5 athletics. Regardless if anyone agrees or disagrees with this approach, that increases the value of attending Utah and is why Utah and other peer P4/5 institutions collect “student fees”.Again, most other public schools were getting a portion of revenue from “student fees” and so Utah determined that they should do something similar. People act like Utah is ripping off students with these mandatory fees. That’s simply wrong. Utah is attracting larger and larger amounts of students away from California and Arizona who want to attend a PAC 12 school but don’t want to pay the higher prices of tuition to attend Arizona or ASU or any of the California schools. Utah is still one of the most affordable schools amongst its peers for students to attend and this is reflected by the continued growth in enrollment.
Absolutely if we had less money, we would also spend less money. But that doesn’t change how much we’re actually netting.
Imagine someone makes $100k/yr salary…but also has generous parents who give him $20k/yr. And he then spends $118k/yr.
It’s nice to know that if his parents suddenly cut him off he’d cut spending to $95k…but it still doesn’t change that he’s depending on his parents’ generosity to finance his current lifestyle.
If Utah made a lot less money (for whatever reason, including less state/student support), they’d spend less…but that would also almost certainly have an impact on the end product. That’s all I’m saying. If you read below you’ll see that I don’t really have an issue with student fees
I see your last post and understand how you see it. I was just pointing out that the way you were cutting out the student fees to show whether these schools would be profitable or not is inaccurate. I can’t speak for all other athletic departments, but I’d assume most operate budgets the same way Utah does. Regardless, Utah would not be in the red if they didn’t get revenue from student fees…they’d still be in the black but just reporting lower revenues each year.
So many of these figures are meaningless without the details. For example, Utah sports pay rent to the University to play in both the Smith’s ballpark, Huntsman and RES (I don’t know about other facilities). Which other schools pay those fees? If they don’t pay rent, is that institutional support? Utah athletic department pays the costs associated with scholarships, including housing, food, etc. Do all schools do that? If the athletic department does not pay those costs but they are paid from general fund or some other university budget, is that included in institutional support?
If you look at NCAA athletic financial disclosures, all athletic departments report the cost of scholarships as expenses for the AD, not as institutional support. That’s standardized.
On athletic facility rental/lease/use fees, every school also reports them as an expense (item 34). Those who have the University pay it (instead of the AD) still have it listed as an expense, but ALSO have it listed as a revenue from the University in indirect institutional support (item 6A). In Utah’s case then it is listed as an expense, but not as an institutional support.
The financial reports do a pretty good job of treating each team the same. Do you have any other questions about what is considered revenue/expenses or how this is calculated? Happy to address any you have
One note on student fees and institutional support: it used to bother me, but doesn’t nearly as much anymore. If I’m a 45 year old grad student from Madagascar, part of my tuition is also being used to support the theatre program. Or Band. Or a new computer lab. Or a free student gym. None of which I might happen to use. The big difference is that it’s broken out as a “student fee” for athletics, but there’s no readily visible “Fine Arts Student Fee”. When you go to a university, your tuition money will always be used to support a variety of things that you don’t necessarily use or care about.
The biggest problem I have is the federal facilitation of large rates of student debt. The feds have ensured all students access to these loans which has naturally fueled elevation of cost to the student. The debt students are incurring is not reasonably serviceable for many graduates. This causes significant hardship and now the feds are in the process of forgiving massive quantities of student debt- but without doing anything to fix the underlying problem.
Athletic fees are just a part of this. Loans should be based on ability to pay them back. It is absurd to facilitate and normalize adultish children borrowing money they will not be able to repay en masse. Supporting unprofitable athletic departments to the detriment of students is one part of the much bigger problem Americans have with debt.
Exactly. If you were to look at how much the cost of a college education has risen over the decades, it goes right in line with the amounts borrowed by students. It’s simple economics…when there’s a lot of “free” money being bandied about, well that’s a surefire recipe for inflation. Now, combine that with people going to school for degrees that have little to no inherent value and you have the worst of both worlds.
surely you can’t be suggesting that 25% of the classes I was forced to take at the U didn’t come from departments which aren’t fully supportable without the graduation requirement?
Student fees support many departments that would fail otherwise. Drama, Art History, Philosophy, Nutrition.,, just a few examples of departments that exist solely to make the ivory tower types feel good about themselves while deriving the bulk of their revenue due to every student being forced to take a 101 course. If a University were to only support degrees with inherent value, it would become a Tech school overnight.
Don’t forget to mention the textbook scam associated with all courses or degrees. I wonder where all of that money is going to?
straight into the author’s/professor’s pocket after passing through the publisher. Prof’s who get to assign their own books make a pretty nice supplemental income that isn’t taxed as such since it is considered royalties.
My father rewrote the science curriculum for his local school district and then published a k-12 primer with a ton of teaching lessons for introducing mechanical engineering concepts at different levels. He didn’t have the ability to force his students to purchase the book but still gets small royalty checks every month. Imagine if he could force the University bookstore to carry a couple hundred new versions every quarter/semester of a book that would normally not have an audience at inflated prices.
Why’d you change your icon?
it was tough to put the perfect 10 on hiatus but my sister quilted me a one of kind, hooded wrap(?) to wear at cold weather games. I thought I’d show it off for awhile before putting ms Dabritz back where she belongs.
Kudos to your sister Champ…the hooded wrap is most definitely a 10!
You must be assuming he has a sister/wife.
Haha! Oops, I missed that important detail. Fixed my post to “sister”….thanks!
Nothing against your wrap but I’m looking forward to seeing the unique Ms. Dabritz back again soon when you respond.
She does make you want to stand up and say hi
That she does…five foot two and eyes of blue…
I had several professors that wrote the pre-eminent textbook in their field and they all confirmed they got pittance (like $1-2/book). Not bad if there is volume, but the publisher gets most of the money in the racket. For a $150-$200 book. But that was 20 years ago and not sure how the digital age works with all of that. I’m sure the professors don’t get much more. Maybe $3 now with inflation.
sure, no one is getting Lotto type money out of it. But if you can add 5% on top of your salary through multiple books – which also helps with tenure – it’s a worthy venture. It’s not like Prof’s don’t have plenty of time to pump those things out.
I remember taking a philosophy class (at a different school) where I had to buy 4 of his books. It wouldn’t happen if he wasn’t making something off it.
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