Friday, May 13, 2022

North Carolina AD Suggests Reducing Athletic Aid

Recently the AD at the University of North Carolina suggested allowing Division I athletic departments to compete in different divisions (i.e. Division II) in order to reduce student athletic aid (why is it always the athletes targeted first)?  So I thought I would look at the data that North Carolina submits to the NCAA in their Membership Financial Reporting System.  The data below comes from the Summary at the end of these reports, and is for "Other Sports" which I proxy for the Olympic sports at North Carolina.

FY Total Revenue Total Expenses Athletic Aid Coach Salary
2015 10,773,092 19,393,562 8752213 4876872
2016 11,450,278 20,796,963 9490971 5415731
2017 12,405,615 22,242,895 10136218 5801609
2018 12,630,321 24,593,295 10748386 7002203
2019 13,213,506 26,267,027 10861085 8247195
2020 13,081,001 25,894,424 10791974 8121618
2021 16,062,468 25,879,163 11506312 7827427

Athletic aid and coaches salary make up about 70% of Other Sports total expenses, and the AD is suggesting that to reduce other sports total expenses by reducing athletic aid.

At the same time athletic endowments are on an upward trend:

FY Athletic Endowment
2017 219,393,267
2018 243,535,866
2019 255,712,686
2020 254,542,329
2021 473,851,140