Western Kentucky University

Recently, CNN did a nice piece on Western Kentucky's move to Division I-A NCAA sports. This got me to thinking about what are the revenues and expenses from schools moving "up" to NCAA Division I-A. In a number of previous posts, I mention that the big NCAA conferences have much higher expenses and much higher per student losses than smaller NCAA conferences.

I only have NCAA revenue and expense data for a few years, and some of it frankly I am having a difficult time of following what they are reporting. So, what I did is looked at Western Kentucky over the 2002-03 to 2005-06 academic years by different sports and calculated their average number of students for each of the 10 sports programs they were including and the average revenues, expenses, profit or loss, and per student profit or loss. I have not adjusted for inflation, so please remember that these figures are in nominal dollars. I will have to come back and look at universities like Western Kentucky and see what is the effect of moving among NCAA athletic ranks. My suspicion is that the costs of competing at higher levels of NCAA athletics will typically be greater than the benefits, else we would see a huge amount of entry among "lower" ranked colleges and universities.

What would be a great study would be to look at the schools that have changed affiliation and see what effect that has on the athletic budget. Now the big problem with this is that there is no uniform reporting of athletic revenues and expenses. Supposedly, the NCAA is going to enforce uniform accounting, which would be great to guide the financial impacts. I have noticed that some schools, such as Boston College always break-even (i.e. revenues and expenses are always the same), which frankly is a bigger miracle than when Doug Flutie tossed the "Hail Mary" against Miami in the 80's.

Anyway, here is the table for the 10 sports that Western Kentucky competed in from 2002-03 to 2005-06.

Western Kentucky
2002/03 - 2005/06	Male	Revenue	Expenses	Profit/Losses	Per Student
Baseball	37.3	$511,899	$503,379	$8,520	$229
Basketball	14.0	$1,819,098	$1,293,276	$525,822	$37,559
All Track Combined	74.5	$240,269	$305,881	-$65,611	-$881
Football	100.8	$2,473,353	$2,141,566	$331,787	$3,293
Golf	12.8	$102,597	$106,927	-$4,330	-$340
Soccer	24.3	$297,239	$314,067	-$16,828	-$694
Softball	NA	NA	NA	NA	NA
Swimming and Diving	34.3	$210,880	$258,466	-$47,585	-$1,389
Tennis	10.3	$72,054	$85,652	-$13,598	-$1,327
Volleyball	NA	NA	NA	NA	NA
Western Kentucky
2002/03 - 2005/06	Female	Revenue	Expenses	Profit/Losses	Per Student
Baseball	NA	NA	NA	NA	NA
Basketball	12.8	$1,174,857	$1,057,336	$117,521	$9,217
All Track Combined	51.8	$299,505	$336,518	-$37,014	-$715
Football	NA	NA	NA	NA	NA
Golf	11.3	$93,313	$100,680	-$7,368	-$655
Soccer	24.5	$462,901	$422,889	$40,012	$1,633
Softball	18.8	$371,685	$336,587	$35,098	$1,872
Swimming and Diving	28.3	$375,428	$321,658	$53,771	$1,903
Tennis	7.3	$94,555	$91,726	$2,829	$390
Volleyball	11.3	$303,651	$310,747	-$7,097	-$631