Does Athletic Success Generate Legislative Largess from Sports-Crazed Representatives? The Impact of Athletic Success on State Appropriations to Colleges and Universities

Donald Alexander () and William Kern ()
Additional contact information
Donald Alexander: Western Michigan University
William Kern: Western Michigan University

International Journal of Sport Finance, 2010, vol. 5, issue 4, 253-267

Abstract: State supported universities have been investing considerable sums in intercollegiate athletics in the hope that such investments will pay off in terms of increased enrollments, improved student quality, and economic benefits such as revenues from ticket sales and bowl and tournament appearances. Does athletic success also yield returns in the form of greater state appropriations? This paper finds that there is some evidence to support this contention though the impact on state appropriations appears to be concentrated more heavily on the members of Division I-A with winning football or basketball programs. There appears to be little impact for schools that are members of Divisions I-AA, II, or III or on DI-A schools that fail to attain on-field success. It also appears that conference affiliation has little impact on appropriations as well. These findings call into question the benefit of continued investment in intercollegiate athletics by schools in these divisions or by schools with little chance of athletic success at the Division I-A level.

Keywords: educational finance; state and federal aid (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.fitinfotech.com/IJSF/IJSFbackissueWVU.tpl (text/html)
Full-text download requires subscription from FIT.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:jsf:intjsf:v:5:y:2010:i:4:p:253-267

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.fitinfote ... IJSFbackissueWVU.tpl

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Sport Finance is currently edited by Arne Feddersen, Babatunde Buraimo, Joachim Prinz and Jane Ruseski

More articles in International Journal of Sport Finance from Fitness Information Technology
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Victor Matheson ().