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When James Madison University’s football team takes on the University of Oregon on Saturday night in the opening round of the College Football Playoffs, JMU’s students ought to be cheering loudly.
After all, they’re the ones paying for JMU to have a playoff team.
In Monday’s column, I showed how JMU makes students pay some of the highest mandatory fees for intercollegiate athletics in the state — and how JMU’s rate is well out of line with those of the other 11 teams in the playoffs. Seven schools don’t charge any mandatory student fee for athletics. Of the four schools that do, JMU’s rate is more than four times higher than all of them combined.
Or, if you’d like to think of it this way, you can: JMU’s unusually high mandatory student fee for athletics is almost nine times higher than its mandatory student fee for student health services.
I made the case that JMU is funding its big-time college football ambitions by essentially taxing its students — an argument that did not endear me to some of my fellow JMU alumni, who think it’s just fine to make students pay more than $3,000 a year for the privilege of having a quasi-professional football team play on campus and the prestige that is added to your diploma because of it.
The absence of such a fee at most of the other playoff schools, and the rather meager amounts at the ones that do charge students (tops is $280 at Tulane), raises the question of how they fund their athletic programs if they’re not making students pay the bill. I pointed out in that column that most of the other schools belong to conferences with big TV contracts (the Big Ten and the Southeastern Conference are the leaders), while JMU plays in the less prestigious Sun Belt Conference.
Today I’m going to dig deeper into the funding of college athletics. Some of my fellow JMU alums may want to skip out now because you’re probably not going to like much of what follows. Bonus for other readers: There are some comparisons in here for other Virginia schools, but some of you may not like that, either. So, let’s kick off …
JMU generates more money from mandatory student fees than any other school in the country
JMU isn’t just out of line with other Virginia schools or other schools in the football playoffs; it’s out of line with everyone. The Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics and the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University have put together a database on athletic funding at all Division I schools (minus a few private schools that decline to divulge data). I ran a search on student fees to see how they compared. Let’s ease into this.
First, here are the total fees per school, as reported by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (sorry, you may have to squint):
Now, let’s see how much actual money those fees generate at the other D1 schools in Virginia.
Virginia Military Institute has the highest fee but has a small enrollment, so it winds up near the bottom. What makes JMU (and to a lesser extent Old Dominion University and Virginia Commonwealth University) stand out so much is that they have large enrollments, so the dollars add up. In JMU’s case, it’s a high fee times a large enrollment (21,358 undergraduates this fall, according to SCHEV).
So, how does that compare nationally? Here’s how:
There are so many schools that it’s impossible to read all the names at the bottom (although the program did generate a long list I could read). That tallest spike you see? That’s JMU. The school raised $55.53 million from mandatory student fees in 2024, according to the Knight Newhouse database. The second-biggest spike? That’s Old Dominion University: $32.39 million. The fourth-biggest spike: Virginia Commonwealth University at $26.22 million.
That’s right, of the four schools that raise the most for athletics from mandatory student fees, three are in Virginia. Ultimately, this isn’t just a JMU issue; it’s a Virginia issue because many schools in other states don’t charge any such fees at all. In Virginia, every public college does. Do those schools squeeze money for athletics out of students in other ways that don’t show up in a “mandatory student fee for athletics” line? Well, let’s take a look.
JMU subsidizes its athletic programs more than all but one other school in the country
I heard from some of my fellow JMU alums who weren’t very happy with my column. They made the case that JMU was being penalized for being honest about its athletic funding while other schools dun students in different ways, they just don’t label it a mandatory fee for athletics. Fair enough. Those “different ways” come under the heading of “institutional support,” a nice, vague term that purposely obscures where much of that institutional money comes from. For state schools such as JMU, it generally comes from taxes and tuition.
Conveniently, the Knight-Newhouse database accounts for this.
While JMU is raising $55.53 million from mandatory student fees, it reports just $1.79 million in “institutional support.” How does this compare?
This compares the combination of “institutional support” and “mandatory student fees” to try to get at the point some readers were suggesting — schools that make students pay for athletics in other ways. Once again, we see JMU tops the chart, with nearly twice as much revenue as its nearest competitors (almost all of which is from student fees, so the Virginia schools appear to be pretty consistent in their accounting transparency).
Now let’s see how we compare nationally:
The highest spike belongs to the University of South Florida, with $63.66 million in those two categories combined. Most of that comes not from student fees ($17.32 million) but from “institutional/government support” ($46.34 million). Together, they account for 62% of South Florida’s athletic funding. Students and taxpayers in Florida are funding that school’s athletic dreams.
The second-biggest spike, though, belongs to our very own JMU — and almost all that $57.3 million comes from student fees. Even if some other schools are being disingenuous about where their money comes from, JMU still is a national outlier in terms of funding its athletic programs. The only other two programs even close are the U.S. Air Force Academy ($52.82 million) and Arizona State ($51.74 million).
Mandatory student fees pay for nearly three-quarters of JMU’s athletic budget
So how do schools pay for athletics? JMU stands out not just because of how much it generates from mandatory student fees, but also how little it generates from other sources. Let’s walk through the main ones.
At James Madison, 73% of the athletic budget comes from those mandatory student fees, according to the Knight-Newhouse database.
Here’s how that compares to the other playoff schools:
James Madison: 73%
Georgia: 2%
Alabama: 0%
Indiana 0%
Texas A&M: 0%
Ohio State 0%
Oklahoma: 0%
Ole Miss 0%
Oregon 0%
Texas Tech 0%
Two schools — Miami and Tulane — didn’t disclose their percentages. Both charge mandatory fees for athletics, but they’re not large compared to JMU ($170 a year at Miami, $280 at Tulane), so the percentages, while not 0%, can’t be large.
At Radford, mandatory athletic fees pay for an even bigger percentage of the athletic budget
While we’re at it, let’s compare JMU’s percentage to other D1 schools in Virginia. This is what percentage of the athletic budget comes from mandatory student fees, according to Knight-Newhouse.
Radford: 75%
James Madison: 73%
George Mason: 66%
Old Dominion: 61%
Virginia Commonwealth: 58%
William & Mary: 49%
Virginia Military Institute: 36%
Virginia: 11%
Virginia Tech: 10%
What we see here is that the two schools that are in the biggest athletic conference, the University of Virginia and Virginia Tech, depend the least on student fees. It’s the schools in conferences without a lot of TV money that rely more on making students subsidize their intercollegiate athletic programs. Three of the five schools that fund most of their athletic budgets with student fees don’t have football programs. Football is typically the big moneymaker that helps support other sports programs. JMU is unusual because it does have a football program, a nationally ranked one, but is still mostly funded by mandatory student fees. There’s a reason for that, we’ll get to shortly.
Even if we account for other ‘institutional support,’ JMU is still an outlier
If we add “institutional support/government” to the mandatory fees, here’s what that does to our national playoff field: JMU remains very different from the other schools — and some still get no funding from their school.
JMU: 75%
Indiana: 20%
Texas Tech: 12%
Georgia: 2%
Ole Miss: 2%
Texas A&M: 2%
Alabama: 1%
Ohio State 0%
Oklahoma: 0%
Oregon 0%
Now let’s compare JMU to other D1 schools in Virginia; here’s what percentage of the athletic budget comes from a combination of institutional support and mandatory student fees:
George Mason: 82%
Radford: 77%
James Madison: 75%
Virginia Commonweath: 73%
Old Dominion: 61%
Virginia Military Institute: 38%
University of Virginia: 17%
Virginia Tech: 12%
What should we conclude from this? We often think of some of these nationally ranked schools as “football factories” and, in terms of their football programs, they sure are. But if we think those schools are funding those programs, that’s a myth. It’s the George Masons and Radfords and James Madisons and so forth that are funding sports programs, mostly through the wallets of students.
While there’s probably some private funding sloshing around that “institutional support” somewhere, if we were to stand on fiscal purity and say no state school could force its students to pay for intercollegiate athletics, and no “institutional support” could go toward a sports entertainment division, the list above shows by how much each school would have to cut its athletic budget — or find funding elsewhere. Some of those programs simply wouldn’t survive in their present form. My JMU Dukes certainly wouldn’t be playing on national television this weekend with a theoretical shot at a national title.
JMU relies so heavily on mandatory student fees because it doesn’t have a lot of donors or TV money
So how do the Alabamas and Ohio States and those other big-name programs manage to pay for their programs if they’re not making students do it? Easy. They have what JMU doesn’t have: deep-pocketed donors, lucrative TV contracts and massive stadiums full of fans buying expensive tickets. At all the other schools in the playoffs, the biggest source of funding is either donors or conference money, aka TV revenue.
I’ll spare you all the numbers, but Ohio State is pretty typical. Here’s where Knight Newhouse says the Buckeyes get their funding:
OHIO STATE
Conference: 29%
Ticket sales: 23%
Donors: 21%
Other revenue: 14%
Corporate sponsorship: 13%
That’s how Ohio State manages to get by with no mandatory student fees or institutional support going to athletics. Even if you subtract the donors, 79% of Ohio State’s athletic funding essentially comes from the free market.
Now here’s JMU:
JAMES MADISON UNIVERSITY
Student fees: 73%
Donors: 7%
Ticket sales: 6%
Conference: 4%
Other revenue: 3%
Corporate sponsorship: 2%
Institutional support: 2%
Competition guarantees: 1% (That’s where other schools guarantee JMU a certain amount of money if they play. This often happens when a higher-ranked team pays a lower-ranked team as an incentive to schedule what might be an easy win for the former.)
Where the free market supports 79% of Ohio State’s athletics, it only supports 25% of JMU’s. These figures are from before JMU joined the Sun Belt conference, so its conference money will increase. Still, at ODU, the Sun Belt school with the most athletic revenue, conference money accounts for just 6% of its budget, not much different from the 4% at JMU pre-Sun Belt. In college sports, there are the “haves” and the “have nots.” JMU (and ODU) are among the “have nots,” so they’re trying to make up for that by making their students pay.
JMU has the lowest donor base of any playoff team
Percentages give us one picture, actual dollars another. Here’s how JMU’s donor base shapes up against other playoff schools.
JMU has the lowest ticket sales of any playoff team
Same story, just different data.
Ever since the playoff field was set, sports commentators have been saying that JMU doesn’t belong — that its inclusion was a fluke brought about by the NCAA’s Rube Goldberg-like playoff selection rules that passed over higher-ranked teams in favor of the champion from a mid-major conference as a way to appease those “lesser” programs.
The best way to prove them wrong would be for the Dukes to go out to Oregon and kick some Duck butt on the field. I’m hoping they do, not just because I’m an alum, but because it would help demonstrate how messed up the process of crowning a college football champion is. If JMU could do that, what about some of the schools that didn’t make the cut?
However, if we turned to Adam Smith, the “father of economics,” he’d also say JMU doesn’t belong in this field, just for other reasons: If donors and the free market aren’t enough to fund JMU’s athletic budget, why should the government — by forcing students to underwrite the program? As we say in the country, JMU is trying to rise above its raising: It wants to be a big-time sports power, but doesn’t have the donors or the TV revenue or the ticket sales revenue that other schools do. It does, however, have a student body that is so eager to attend the Harrisonburg school that they’re willing to pay $3,000 extra a year. Maybe that’s just another form of the free market — those students could choose to go somewhere else and pay less, but they don’t. More realistically, many may not even pay attention to that line item when they write the check.
Still, we need to think in terms of opportunity cost. JMU’s high mandatory fees are a deliberate policy choice across multiple administrations in Wilson Hall — and multiple boards of visitors (the current one appointed by a Republican governor). A thought experiment: What if, instead of extracting $55 million from students each year and using it on a sports entertainment division, JMU spent that money instead on, say, a cancer research center? Or some other public service function? What would be the greater good? I say all this fancifully because I know that will never happen. Still, I must ask, in all seriousness: We know taxpayers would howl if they were forced to pay for professional sports (besides the occasional publicly funded stadium), so why does the state condone a system where students are forced to subsidize an increasingly professionalized system of intercollegiate athletics that they will never play? Other states and other schools don’t. Why does Virginia?
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