If a student at one of Virginia’s state-supported colleges worked a summer job at the state’s new minimum wage of $12.77, it would take them nearly a month to pay for just one item on their college tuition bill: mandatory fees to support intercollegiate athletics.
An annual report last week from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia on tuition and fees found that the cost to attend a state-supported four-year school is rising at a faster rate than it has been — and the single fastest-growing category of expense is the fees students are required to pay to help fund their school’s intercollegiate sports programs.
The report found that for the 2026-27 school year, total charges (which cover tuition and various education fees, plus those sports fees) have risen by 3.9%, a faster rate than the two previous years.
Put another way, the rate of increase had been slowing — from 4.3% in 2023-24 to 3.4% in 2024-25 to 3.1% in 2025-26.
They could increase more in the future: The budget the state adopted this summer lifts the cap on tuition increases. These numbers likely deserve more attention because this increase runs counter to campaign promises from Gov. Abigail Spanberger to make the state more affordable. Many of these increases were likely in the works before she took office, and her appointees have yet to take complete control of the state’s education system. However, once they do, they will own these cost increases, especially if the increases continue. That’s a political debate for another day. For now, the key thing is that total charges are rising at a faster rate than the national rate of inflation.
Meanwhile, those mandatory fees for athletics have risen by an even faster rate — 5.5% over the past year. That’s a faster increase than any other category of expenses SCHEV looked at.
To be sure, these mandatory fees for athletics don’t necessarily constitute a large percentage of what students have to pay so aren’t the sole reason or even the main reason why costs are going up. The mandatory fees for athletics average $1,967 per student while total costs for in-state undergraduates average $30,759, so the athletic fees account for 6.3% of the total bill.
However, referring to averages masks the wide disparity in those fees across Virginia’s four-year college system — and doesn’t address the philosophical question of why students should pay to subsidize what are increasingly professionalized sports programs. That student subsidy isn’t unique to Virginia, but Virginia schools do stand out nationally for their reliance on making students financially support intercollegiate sports programs.
Let’s take a closer look at each of these points.
Some students pay more than $4,000 for sports, others less than $1,000
First, a quick primer on the economics of intercollegiate athletics. Schools that play at the highest levels — such as Virginia Tech and the University of Virginia, both members of the Atlantic Coast Conference — derive most of their revenue from television rights, donors, corporate sponsorships and ticket revenues. Schools that play at lower levels don’t have those kinds of revenues and so rely mostly on student fees to pay the bills.
This explains why the two schools at the highest level — Virginia Tech and Virginia — have the lowest mandatory fees for athletics. At Virginia, it’s $823 per year; at Virginia Tech, $832.
The schools that operate college sports at lower levels charge more. The University of Virginia’s College at Wise charges $3,072 Christopher Newport University $3,086, Longwood University $3,206, Virginia Military Institute $4,186.
Every school except one raised athletic fees at a faster rate than they raised tuition
Tuition (and related educational fees) increased at every state-supported Virginia school, from 1.5% at Christopher Newport University to 4.8% at Old Dominion University.
With just one exception, every school raised the athletic fee at a faster rate — from 3.0% at VMI to 13.7% at Old Dominion and Virginia Tech. The only school to reduce its athletic fee was Virginia State University, which cut it by $132, which works out to -8.7%.
Many other states don’t make students subsidize athletic programs
Now comes the part that usually produces the hate mail from college sports fans who think it’s just fine that Virginia students have to pay these mandatory fees for intercollegiate athletics. One standard defense is that other states do this, too, they just do a better job hiding the fees. In other words, Virginia schools stand open to criticism because they are more transparent in their accounting. That’s a fair defense, except that it doesn’t appear to be true.
The Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics and Syracuse University have created the Knight-Newhouse College Athletics Database that makes it easy to compare all this data. The financial records at many schools in other states don’t show any mandatory student fees for athletics, but that may not be definitive. Let’s instead look at the category of “institutional support,” on the theory that some schools might simply factor athletic costs into their general pricing without providing a specific line item like Virginia does. Even when we do that, some schools still come out at zero support. How can that be? Here’s how:
Last week the sports news site The Athletic produced a report on how much the nation’s top college football teams — just the football teams, not the whole athletic program — are worth. The most valuable one was the University of Texas, valued at a level equal to many Major League Baseball teams not named the New York Yankees or Los Angeles Dodgers. The Knight-Newhouse database shows that the Longhorns sports programs don’t get a dime from either student fees or “institutional support.” How do they do this? Through Texas-sized donations (49% of total revenues), ticket sales (20%) and corporate support (19%), mostly. All those dwarf the conference media rights that Texas collects (10% of total revenues).
OK, Texas is Texas, so let’s look somewhere else. Ohio State shows a similar profile, although it does get a smidge of institutional support, which still shows up as so small it’s almost 0% on the pie chart. Some of the best-known college sports programs don’t need institutional support because they’re essentially supported by the free market (and donations). It’s the others that need additional revenue, be it from the institution or students. At Virginia Tech, student fees account for 10% of the athletics revenue ($15.66 million) while institutional support comes in at 5% ($8.43 million). Together that’s $24.09 million. For comparison purposes, Clemson — a Tech rival in the ACC — shows no student fees but $20.18 million in institutional support. Let’s assume that includes some hidden student fees, In that case, Tech would be in line with one of its peer schools. Whether universities should be supporting what now constitute professionalized sports programs is a philosophical question we can save for later, but the point here is that Tech is not an outlier.
The schools that are outliers are James Madison University and Old Dominion University. Both are trying to operate top-tier sports programs without top-tier funding. Both get relatively little money from their conference media rights, donors or ticket sales. They also devote relatively little in terms of institutional support: $2.19 million at JMU (3% of the program), $540,000 at ODU (1% of the program). Instead, they rely on mandatory student fees. At ODU, those fees generate $33.91 million, accounting for 58% of the athletic budget. At JMU, those fees generate $58.14 million, or 74%.
Let’s frame this another way: JMU derives more from student fees than Virginia Tech does from donors — and more than donors give each year to the University of Michigan ($50 million), which is rated as the fourth most-valuable college football program in the country. Should JMU students be forced to substitute for Michigan’s deep-pocket donors? There’s your philosophical question.
Disclosure: I’m a JMU grad. I cheer for the Dukes, but if I rely on the economics lessons I took at JMU then what I see is that JMU doesn’t have a market big enough to support a top-tier football program. State law, though, allows it to charge students to pay the cost of having one. State law does put a cap on what percentage of the school’s athletic budget can come from student fees — 60%. JMU has a grace period to meet that cap since it moved up to the SunBelt but isn’t moving closer to the goal, according to the Knight-Newhouse database.
You can argue that students who attend JMU make a market choice to accept that fee as part of the price for going to school there; if they truly objected they could go somewhere else. However, you can also argue that it’s more in the state’s interest to see students educated than entertained — and the cost of attending school could be cut by 17.4% if those fees weren’t required. What would happen to JMU’s football program then? If donors or corporate sponsors didn’t step forward, then JMU wouldn’t be able to operate at the level it wants to be.
Is it in the state’s interest that JMU — or ODU or Virginia Tech or Virginia — be able to operate a football program at the highest level? That’s not a question that gets asked a lot. Should it? This year’s state budget includes a provision sponsored by state Sen. Creigh Deeds, D-Charlottesville, that directs the General Assembly’s investigative arm to conduct a study on college sports financing. Among the areas of inquiry: How other states fund theirs and what the “local, regional, and statewide economic impact of college athletics” is. The report is due Nov. 1, 2028. That last phrase makes it likely the report will find that college sports have a positive economic impact on the state — in which case the question will become whether students should be the ones funding economic development.
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