Suppose I were to tell you that Salem and Lynchburg were imposing a $1,000-per-person tax on all their residents to pay for the cities’ minor league baseball teams?
Or that Roanoke and Wythe County had likewise enacted a $1,000-per-person tax to pay for their minor league hockey teams?
I suspect the only question would be how long the lines would be at the next council or board of supervisors meeting to sign up to protest. Well, maybe not in Salem; Salem does love its sports.
Regardless, that’s the closest analogy to what the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors will be asked to do Tuesday: raise the mandatory student fees that go to intercollegiate athletics so that Virginia Tech can more effectively compete in the Atlantic Coast Conference.
That’s not quite the whole story. Let’s back up and go over the whole story, which involves two of my favorite things, politics and sports, although when they overlap, they’re often not quite so much fun.
As I pointed out in a recent column, the nation’s top college sports conferences were once relatively evenly matched in terms of financial resources. That’s now changed, with a wild gulf opening up between two marquee leagues, the Big Ten and the Southeastern Conference, and all the others. TV is a big driver behind that, but not the only one. The Business of College Sports says that Big Ten schools will get an average of $71.8 million each year from their TV contract; the SEC schools $68.75 million. The teams in the ACC, in which Virginia Tech plays, get $17.1 million.
At its August meeting, the board of visitors heard from Athletic Director Whit Babcock, who warned that Tech was falling behind, resource-wise, even in what amounts to a low-dollar conference. He said that Virginia Tech’s $122 million a year athletic budget ranks 14th in the 18-member ACC. Since then, Tech has fired its football coach, after the team got off to a disastrous 0-3 start. The real challenge for the next coach isn’t just to win, it’s to make Virginia Tech football more marketable. Come 2030, we may see a major round of conference realignment — the reasons why are here. If the ACC falls apart, as the Pac-12 did when all but two of its teams fled for better TV contracts elsewhere, Tech could find itself left out in a game of musical chairs.
On Tuesday, the board of visitors holds a special meeting to take up a proposal to increase its spending on intercollegiate athletics with a plan that would ratchet up the sports budget to $212.1 million by fiscal year 2029, just a year before conference alignment could start all over again.
In a statement, Virginia Tech said: “The landscape of intercollegiate athletics nationwide has evolved dramatically over the past year. The gap between top-tier programs and all other programs has widened. Without additional investment, the university and the region risk declining revenues. Potential losses to existing university revenues such as media rights, ticket sales, and sponsorships, for example, would likely have a negative impact on non-revenue sports, brand value, and alumni connection.”
Some of that proposed increase in the athletic budget would come from increased “institutional support,” but the biggest amount would be more “philanthropy,” meaning hitting up boosters for an extra $30 million a year. What catches my eye is the smallest revenue line: a proposed increase in the mandatory student fee.
I am straining against the bit to fairly lay out the facts here but since this is an opinion column, be aware that I see these mandatory student fees for intercollegiate sports as essentially a tax on students to support what amounts to be the school’s minor league sports team. More on that later. For now, some more facts and figures.
Virginia Tech has already raised its mandatory student fee for athletics. For the 2024-25 school year, it was $437. For the current school year, it’s $732 — an increase of 67.5%.
The proposal that the board of visitors will take up Tuesday would increase that by $100 a year — to $832 for fiscal year 2027, then $932 for fiscal year 2028 and finally $1,032 for fiscal year 2029. By then, it’s estimated the increase would have brought in an additional $21.3 million — or about 9.2% of the increased athletic spending.
The proposal says: “VT is expected to continue to have the lowest comprehensive fee of the Virginia public institutions.”
That seems likely true.
Virginia Tech currently has the lowest mandatory student fee for intercollegiate athletics of any state-supported four-year school in Virginia, according to figures posted by the State Council for Higher Education in Virginia. The average is $2,012, nearly three times what Tech currently charges. The highest such fee is $4,186 at Virginia Military Institute. Since VMI is atypical in so many ways, let’s temporarily set VMI aside. The next highest figure is $3,036 at my alma mater of James Madison University, which is pursuing big-time college sports without the benefit of a big TV market or the generational wealth that other schools have. (A Sportico report a year ago said that 78% of JMU’s athletic money came from student fees.)
Virginia Tech also has one of the lowest overall tuition rates among Virginia’s state-supported schools. Its total cost — tuition, fee, room and board, all the rest — is $29,426 per year, according to SCHEV. That’s slightly below the state average of $29,538 and well below the $35,356 at the University of Virginia and the state-high $43,057 at the College of William & Mary.
In economic terms, Virginia Tech seems to have market capacity. It can raise its mandatory student fee for intercollegiate athletics to $1,032 by 2029 and still be at about half of what the state average is today. It can do that and likely still have overall costs that, at worst, are in line with what other state schools will be in 2029 and, at best, might still be a little below them (because expenses elsewhere are likely to rise anyway). As colleges go, Virginia Tech is a bargain and will remain so.
Virginia Tech likely won’t lose a single student over this increase — and if it does, they can be easily replaced because Tech is always swamped by applications. From an economic point of view, Tech’s board of visitors ought to pass this proposal without a second thought.
But that’s not the only point of view available here.
There’s this one: Why is Tech shaking down its own students to pay for a sports entertainment division? Why must students — at Tech or anywhere else — pay a mandatory fee for intercollegiate athletics at all? Except for a select few, most Tech students aren’t going to be playing these sports.
Granted, students wind up paying for lots of things they may not participate in. They pay a mandatory fee for student health services they may never use if they don’t get sick. They pay a mandatory fee for parking and transportation they may never use if they don’t have a car and walk to class. They pay a mandatory fee for recreational and intramural facilities they may ever use if they’re not into working out or playing intramural sports. They pay a mandatory fee for student unions that typically book various types of entertainment programming — speakers, bands and so forth that some students may never go to hear. The difference is that students could go do all these things — use the health services, park in the parking lot, work out in the gym, go hear that speaker — if they wanted to. Realistically, ordinary students aren’t going to be walking onto the football team.
So why must students be forced to pay for intercollegiate sports? At some point, this becomes a question of why we even have these sports. Some of those potential answers are spelled out in the proposal before the Tech board: “serves as a key part of the Hokie experience for many students and employees” and “facilitates lifelong connections for our alumni.”
All that’s true. Still, though, we’re in an era where the marquee sports at Tech’s level — primarily football — have become professionalized. Hence, my analogy that Tech students are being taxed to help pay for minor league sports. Worse, students are going into debt to pay for this (SCHEV’s most recent figures say 46% of Tech students graduate with debt).
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As a percentage of the total cost, the share of the total cost going to intercollegiate athletics is small and at Tech it’s smaller than at, say, VMI or JMU. Nonetheless, there remains the point of the matter. Tech’s board is now run by Republicans, nominees of Gov. Glenn Youngkin. Raising these mandatory student fees doesn’t feel like an act of conservatism to me — it smacks of big government tax-and-spend. Maybe this isn’t really a tax — students choose to pay this by becoming students. By that same logic, though, the hated car tax isn’t a tax because I could get out of paying it by not owning a car.
I keep waiting for some politician to stand up against these fees. More likely, though, they’re going to be standing up at the 50-yard line cheering on their favorite team.
A look at the early voting trends so far
In this week’s edition of West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter, I’ll take a deep dive into what the first week’s worth of early voting tells us. You can sign up here for any of our newsletters: