If a student entered James Madison University in 2022 and graduated on time in 2026, that student would have paid $11,689 in mandatory student fees to pay for the school’s intercollegiate athletics programs.
Some see this as just a routine part of the college experience; others (and I count myself in this camp) see this as students being squeezed to pay for what is increasingly a professionalized sports program.
Either way, the bill is the same. So is this stat: Thirty-six percent of JMU’s students take out student loans to pay for college.
That means more than one-third of JMU’s student body is going into debt partly to pay for the sports program.
Now, maybe 36% of JMU’s student body would have to take out loans no matter whether those fees existed or not, but the point is that about 5,826 students (36% of the school’s total enrollment) is having to incur some debt so that 549 of their fellow students can play an intercollegiate sport at a high level — and some of those 549 are now getting paid to do so. We don’t know exactly how much, but The Athletic has estimated that JMU’s football roster costs $1 million, a relatively small sum in today’s college football world. At Ohio State, The Athletic estimates the roster payroll adds up to somewhere between $49 million and $54 million. At Virginia Tech, it’s estimated to be between $25 million and $30 million. At the University of Virginia, $20 million to $24 million. In other words, some students are incurring debt to help subsidize the activities of other students who are getting paid, some likely at a six-figure level or more.
Is this fair? People see fairness in different ways, so maybe that’s not the right question. This might be a better one: Is this good public policy?
By default, it’s the policy we have, whether it’s good or not. The public aspect of it comes in multiple ways: JMU is a state school. The cost of what it takes to educate students — our future workforce — is very much a public concern. The levels of debt that those students incur is a public concern, too, because that has implications for years to come: Money that people are using to pay off student loans is not being used on other things, from buying houses to buying cars to affording children.
So I ask again: Is it good public policy to have students going into any debt to pay for intercollegiate sports programs that now increasingly function as minor league teams?
The time will come when Virginia legislators will have to wrestle with this question. Or, more accurately, they will have the opportunity to wrestle with this question. Humans — politicians included — often are quite skillful at avoiding difficult questions. Nonetheless, this year’s General Assembly (in the form of some language in the state budget) has set in motion a study by the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission about the economics of college sports in Virginia. All I’m doing here is asking some questions that the commission staff will eventually need to ask. I single out JMU — my alma mater — because it collects more in mandatory student fees than any other school in Virginia. In 2025, that amounted to $58.14 million. By contrast, the University of Virginia collected $17.34 million in mandatory student fees for intercollegiate athletics, Virginia Tech $15.66 million.
Why the difference? As I’ve noted in previous columns, JMU is trying to run a high-level sports program without two things that Virginia and Virginia Tech have: a lot of deep-pocketed donors and a lot of broadcast money. JMU relies on those mandatory student fees to cover 74% of its athletic budget. At the University of Virginia, those student fees account for just 11% of the athletic budget; at Tech, 10%.
Those of you who have read my previous columns on the economics of college sports have seen all this before and are probably wondering: What’s new? What’s new is this question: How can we fix this and still have intercollegiate sports? The reality is that many colleges are trying to play at a level that the marketplace doesn’t support. When ticket sales and broadcast revenues don’t pay all the bills, they have to turn to donors — or mandatory student fees. Or sometimes their own funds.
That’s been the trend. Ten years ago, the four state schools in Virginia playing football at the highest level — Virginia, Virginia Tech, James Madison and Old Dominion — needed just $650,000 of “institutional support” combined. Virtually all that was at JMU. Today those four schools spend $31.04 million in “institutional support” for intercollegiate athletics. There’s another public policy angle.
Between them, the mandatory student fees at those four schools have risen from $93.39 million in 2015 to $125.05 million in 2025. (All these figures, by the way, come from the Knight Newhouse College Athletics Database, run jointly by the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics and Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications.)
Between institutional support and mandatory student fees, that’s $156.9 million last year that came from someplace other than the free market to make sure the state’s four top football schools had sports programs. I’ve been limiting this data to just those four schools because a) they have the most professionalized programs and b) the database doesn’t include figures for some of Virginia’s smaller state schools. However, if we added in the other schools that the database does have information from — George Mason University, Longwood University, Norfolk State University, Radford University, Virginia Commonwealth University, Virginia Military Institute and the College of William & Mary — then we find that those schools collected $233.85 million from students in mandatory student fees for athletics and added $65 million of institutional support. (That doesn’t necessarily mean these are tax dollars; institutions have lots of nonstate money under their control.)
In all, that’s $298.85 million that comes from someplace other than the marketplace.
There’s a word for this, one that I learned when I was studying political science and economics at JMU: This is socialism. At least the mandatory student fee part of it is.
This isn’t normally how we think of socialism, but that’s exactly what this is. The government — in the form of state-supported schools — is subsidizing college sports that otherwise couldn’t cut it in the marketplace. Instead of using tax dollars, these schools are essentially taxing students. True, these students could choose to go somewhere else if they found these fees too onerous. But it’s also true that anyone who doesn’t like the “car tax” could simply use bicycles instead. Both are somewhat impractical.
There are basically three options here.
One, we can just accept this — and many do.
Two, we could say schools couldn’t charge students these fees or use their own funds to support intercollegiate support. If we did that, we’d have no intercollegiate sports at many schools. That’s not really a realistic option, either.
Three, we could try capitalism.
There’s a tentative trend in college sports for private equity firms to move in to partner with schools and try to figure out how to make some money for everybody. This may not be a good idea. In fact, it may be a terrible idea. But it is an idea that’s taking root. Virginia legislators may want to ponder what rules — if any — they want to govern such deals before they’re presented as a fait accompli somewhere. Here’s one suggestion: If any school were to do this, part of the deal should be that the school can’t charge mandatory student fees, so students aren’t paying to support something that venture capitalists are making money off of.
Here’s another: Right now, students get nothing for these fees, other than being able to have a team to cheer for. Is that enough? Some think so. But what if these fees counted as some sort of equity stake in the sports program? If so, what if students were the ones making money off the deal, in the form of dividends? Or even the ability to sell their stake to some outside investor?
Perhaps some professor teaching a business or economics class at my alma mater will assign this question as a homework assignment. What would be the implications — good, bad, otherwise? Let’s find out.
Early voting is now underway. You can see who’s on the ballot and where they stand on our Voter Guide. In this week’s edition of West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter, I’ll take a look at the trends from the first week of early voting. Sign up here:
