America’s top sports-playing colleges may seem awash in money, and in many ways they are.
However, a closer look shows that many of them are feeling the financial stress of rising expenses in an era where players must be paid — and many of them now depend on mandatory student fees to help underwrite increasingly professionalized sports programs.
The data I’m about to present comes from the Knight-Newhouse College Athletics Database, run by the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics and Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications. The database tracks the finances of college athletics, although most private schools don’t make that information available — so, ironically, Syracuse’s own data doesn’t show up. I looked at the 68 schools in the four biggest conferences, the so-called Power 4 of the Atlantic Coast Conference, the Big Ten, the Big 12 and the Southeastern Conference. Of those 68 schools, the database had information on 53 of them. Among the notable private colleges we don’t know about: Notre Dame, which is well-situated enough to play an independent football schedule and command its own television contract, while playing in the ACC for other sports.
A review of that database turns up the following:
* Only 14 schools made money on their sports program in 2024-25 (the most recent year available) without relying on any support from the school or mandatory student fees.
* Twenty schools made money but only because they received support from the school and/or mandatory student fees to make up shortfalls. Among those 20 was Virginia Tech.
* The other 19 all lost money — including the University of Virginia.
That list doesn’t convey the trendline. While 19 of the Power 4 schools are losing money now, 10 years ago only seven were. The losses for those schools are now widening while other schools are falling into unprofitability as expenses rise — and revenue doesn’t keep up.
The U.S. Senate is currently considering legislation, the Protect College Sports Act, aimed at trying to preserve college sports in some semblance of their college form. Its prospects remain uncertain; I discussed those in a previous column. To what degree that legislation would address the financial predicament that some schools now find themselves in is also uncertain. What is certain is that big-time college sports programs are increasingly functioning as professional leagues, with many of the same expenses that more traditional pro leagues have (player salaries, coaches’ salaries) but without the same revenue base (billionaire owners).
This data underscores how untenable that arrangement is. “Very few schools are earning a profit,” says Andrew Zimbalist, a noted sports economist at Smith College. “They’re going to have to cut back.” The problem is that college football programs have to do something that their NFL counterparts don’t have to: supply enough revenue to underwrite nonrevenue sports, particularly women’s sports. As challenging as the economics are for schools in the Power 4 conference, they are even more difficult for schools that aren’t in those conferences, the so-called “mid-majors” such as James Madison University, Liberty University and Old Dominion University in Virginia. “I think mid-majors would be hit very hard,” Zimbalist says. “It’s going to be hard for them to maintain Title IX and Olympic sports.”
I’ll be digging into this data from multiple angles in future columns. For now, here’s one way to look at all this.
The wealth gap between schools is growing
It’s well-established that while the top conferences were once all reasonably balanced in terms of revenues, now they’re not. The Big Ten and the SEC are clearly the two most affluent conferences. That’s put other conferences in jeopardy; as some schools see the Big Ten and SEC pulling away, they want to join. That led to the collapse of the Pac-12 conference and leaves many wondering if the ACC can survive in its current state.
This data shines light on how even those well-to-do conferences have their own economic disparities.
Of the 14 schools that we know are making money without relying on the school or imposing fees on students (again, we don’t know about private schools, and Notre Dame is a big exception), seven are in the Big Ten and five are in the SEC, so 12 of the 14 money-makers are in just two conferences. The other two are in the Big 12, which means the ACC has no schools that made money on their own without school support. However, those moneymakers still represent a minority of even the Big Ten and the SEC.
Not even these 14 schools turn a profit solely from revenue from TV contracts, ticket sales and such. They all depend on donors. In effect, college sports boosters collectively function as the billionaires who own professional sports franchises.
The 14 schools: Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana State, Tennessee and Texas A&M in the SEC; Michigan, Nebraska, Ohio State, Oregon, Penn State, Purdue and Wisconsin in the Big Ten; Kansas State and Oklahoma State in the Big 12. Most of these show no institutional support or student fees in their revenue. A few do, but only small amounts and would have made money even if that was subtracted. In theory, these 14 schools could operate more or less independently — as long as they had access to the college name, the college stadium and the college donor list.
Students are being billed to keep some programs profitable
Students aren’t being forced to pay these mandatory fees. Students are free to attend other schools that don’t charge those fees. However, at some of those other schools, these charges for intercollegiate sports may simply be worked into the overall bill, which makes it tricky to compare schools across state lines. Schools in states with more transparent accounting (such as ours) come off looking bad when other states may be doing the same thing in a less open fashion. That’s why when I looked at the revenue, I looked at both the student fee line but also the vaguer “institutional/government support” because in some places those could be student fees by another name.
Either way, we have 20 Power 4 schools that only made money because the school helped cover the costs of running an athletic program in some way. Of those 20, seven were in the Big 12, five were in the ACC, five were in the Big Ten and three were in the SEC.
Let’s look at Virginia Tech because, well, it’s ours. The database shows revenues of $161.22 million and expenses of $156.15 million, for what we’d call in the private sector a profit of $5.07 million. The database also shows that Tech had its students pay $15.66 million while the institution supplied $8.43 million. Take away either one of those and Virginia Tech sports would have lost money. As intercollegiate sports become more expensive, schools will need to find additional sources of revenue — that’s what Tech is now in the process of doing with its Hokie Ventures, a nonprofit that will focus on expanding revenue for Tech sports. Virginia law, though, explicitly allows schools to charge students for intercollegiate athletics.
At Tech, the reliance on student fees has been constant: They constituted 10% of revenues in 2015, and 10% in 2025. Some other schools, though, have had to increase their dependence on student fees to keep up. A decade ago, the University of Arizona imposed no mandatory student fees for athletics. Now it does. Without those student fees, Arizona athletics — which made money 10 years ago without such fees — would lose money today. There are some big-name schools — Alabama, Auburn and Florida State — that are only making money because they are able to make students pay for their big-time sports ambitions.
In all, there are now 19 Power 4 schools that a decade ago were making money and now would be losing if it were not for mandatory student fees and/or “institutional support,” which in some cases may include student fees.
Some schools are increasing “institutional support” for college athletics by multiples
It’s hard to tell how some schools define “institutional support” so there may be a definition for each school or at least each state. In any case, the database shows marked increases in that category of revenue. Virginia Tech has gone from $100,000 in “institutional/government support” to $8.43 million over the 10-year span from 2015 to 2025. That puts Tech at about where Arizona was a decade ago. Over the past 10 years, Arizona has tripled “institutional/government support” for college athletics from $8.97 million to $31.38 million.
Some schools that once provided no institutional support now do: The University of Virginia has gone from zero in institutional support to $19.88 million over that same decade. Florida State has gone from zero to $33.87 million. South Carolina has moved from zero to $43.7 million. Wherever that money is coming from, that’s a lot of buckaroos that once weren’t going to athletics.
This is the athletic version of an arms race, as colleges attempt to make up for the widening gap between the haves and the have-a-lots (we’ll get to the have-nots in a future column). While these schools are jacking up their spending on athletics, remember that there are 14 schools that would have made money without any institutional support or student fees. At what point, if any, do some schools admit they just can’t (or won’t) keep up, and we divide the Power 4 conferences into a top tier of schools that can make money on their own and relegate all the others to another tier? That’s the economic reality now in many ways, but that would be a hard sell to a lot of diehard college football fans. Meanwhile, though, there’s red ink in a field awash with money:
Profit margins are declining and some schools are slipping into unprofitability
Virginia Tech is actually in an enviable position: Its athletic program produces more profit today than it did a decade ago. In 2015, the difference between revenues and expenses was $2.55 million. Now it’s $5.07 million.
Other programs, though, have seen their margins decline — and, in 12 cases, disappear altogether.
Ten years ago, Florida State posted a “profit” — I’ll use that word since it’s easily understandable, although that’s not necessarily how schools would look at this money — of $9.43 million. Now that’s down to $3.76 million, even though revenue is up 75%. Expenses have gone up almost 87%. This is why Florida State wants out of the ACC and into a conference where it can make more money.
Same for North Carolina. A decade ago, UNC-Chapel Hill’s athletic programs saw about $500,000 in profit. Now they’re losing $15 million a year, even though revenues have nearly doubled.
In the ACC, two schools — North Carolina and Louisville — have slipped from making money to losing money. However, in the SEC, which we think of as a rich conference, seven schools that once made money are now losing money — including ultra-rich Texas. The numbers are different but the story is always the same: Expenses are rising faster than revenues.
Rutgers broke even a decade ago. Now it’s losing $47.19 million. This isn’t a problem unique to Rutgers. It’s a systematic problem.
Here’s the big picture: Big-time college sports programs are now losing money. The latest reports show that, conference-wide, schools in three of the top four conferences lost money in 2025 — only the Big 12 showed a profit. The two years before, two of the top four conferences did. If we skip over the COVID seasons of 2020 and 2021, then the ACC has lost money for five straight non-COVID seasons (so 2019 and then 2022-25).
How sustainable are the current economics of college sports? That depends on how long people are willing to pay for them — but the nature of who is paying is changing. Some fans are now being asked to dig deeper to pay for things that, in other pro leagues, the owners do. And the students aren’t being asked at all; they’re being told.
We have more political news every week in West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter that goes out on Friday afternoon. This week I’ll be giving some congressional campaign updates and a Dolly Parton tribute coming this weekend.
