Rutgers Athletic Department Financial Information

Rutgers faculty union is suing the University for allegedly failing to provide athletic department financial records.  According to the lawsuit, Rutgers has had an increase in debt by over $75 million from last year.

The records the union are suing for are NOT the athletic department financial information provided below.  Rather, I wanted to show some general financial information about the athletic department at Rutgers.  Here is a snapshot of Rutgers athletic department financial information* since the 2004/2005 academic year. 

The first thing to notice is that Rutgers athletic department breaks even most of the fifteen seasons during this time period - exactly.  

While statistically, we know that this is nearly impossible, something must be going on to achieve this results, and there is - specifically that Rutgers subsidizes their athletic department a lot.

These subsidies come from three sources:  student fees, direct government funds and direct institutional support.  Here is a graph of the three sources of subsidies since the 2004/05 season.  Student fees (in nominal of thousands of dollars) has been steadily increasing, and direct institutional support typically an even larger part of the subsidy received from the athletic department, with direct government support typically a small part of the overall subsidy.

So, what would Rutgers look like without the subsidies?  Below is the total operating revenue (without the subsidies), total operating expenses and the deficit without those subsidies.

*The data comes from the NCAA Membership Financial Reporting System reports that Rutgers provides to the NCAA and were acquired from Freedom of Information Requests.