PatchU: Kent State Students Investigate Academic Versus Athletic Spending

It's no secret that athletics spending outpaces money spent on academics at many of America's public universities.

The Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics released a report in 2010 highlighting that disparity in a broad sense, including with figures on Mid-American Conference schools in Ohio and other divisions across the nation.

But that report was very much on the macro level. So 10 students in Karl Idsvoog's computer-assisted reporting class at this spring filed public records requests with MAC schools, analyzed the data and scaled the issue down to the micro level — explaining how the money you pay to attend college funds athletic programs.

The result is an incredible amount of financial information broken down into easy-to-understand graphics, videos and stories with some astounding revelations — like the fact not one of the 13 MAC schools has a profitable football program.

View the students' work on this special project website created through the Kent State School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

Did you know 37 percent of student fees at Kent State fund athletic programs? Some of the project highlights include:

• Courtney Thomas shows that students and parents probably aren't aware of the millions of dollars they pay that end up funding athletic programs.
• How much of your college tuition bill goes to athletic programs? Bethany Vietmeier has the numbers for Kent State and other MAC schools.
• Alexandra Dellas shows the lack of transparency on your tuition bill.

Idsvoog said the purpose of this semester's project was to give beginning journalists practice going after public records and analyzing data. They chose athletic and academic spending because it's a topic of interest to a statewide audience, and it integrates national data from the Knight Commission to provide context.

Included in this story is just a sampling of the videos, stories and graphics the students produced. View the special project website for their complete body of work.

The documents, video and links attached to this story were all produced or obtained by students at Kent State. The PatchU program is a collaboration Patch.com local sites have with universities in their communities across the country. Look for more spotlights on student journalism projects in the future here on Kent Patch.