by Dick Hall-Sizemore

Gov.-elect Spanberger has released her plan to make Virginia more affordable. Forgive me if I do not see a lot in there that would quickly make life more affordable for most average Virginians. However, Dwayne Yancey of Cardinal News has identified a measure that could make a major expense more affordable for many Virginia families—college fees, intercollegiate athletic fees in particular.

Yancey uses James Madison University as an example. Its football team is one of the 12 teams that made this year’s College Football Playoff. His research revealed that “JMU’s mandatory student fees for [intercollegiate] athletics are more than four times higher than all the other College Football Playoff schools combined.” To be fair, those other schools they have revenue from lucrative TV deals they or their conferences negotiated.

The charges assessed by public institutions of higher education in Virginia can be divided into three categories—tuition, mandatory fees, and room and board. Most of the public attention is on tuition, but mandatory fees and room and board costs exceed tuition and are the fastest growing portion of higher education costs. For anyone interested in the costs of public institutions of higher education in Virginia, this report from the State Council of Higher Education in Virginia has a wealth of information.

In Virginia’s public higher ed institutions, there are two categories of mandatory fees—E&G (Education and general) and non-E&G. E&G fees support instruction-related activities, research and public service, academic support, student services, institutional support, and facility operations and maintenance. Non-E&G fees support non-instructional activities, such as student health services, parking, student unions, recreational and intramural facilities, and intercollegiate athletics. For the current academic year, the fee for intercollegiate athletics is the largest non-E&G fee for all but three of the Commonwealth’s four-year higher ed institutions.  The annual fee ranges from $786 at UVa. to $4,186 at VMI.

The table below shows the total annual cost at each four-year public higher ed institution in Virginia, along with its mandatory fee for intercollegiate athletics and the percentage that fee is of the total cost. (Note: The total cost is the “sticker price.” The actual cost will be less, sometimes significantly so, for most students.)

As demonstrated in the chart, Spanberger and the General Assembly could make college more affordable for the parents of many college students in the Commonwealth by prohibiting the schools from charging students a mandatory fee to support intercollegiate athletics. On average, the savings would be almost $2,100 annually, or more than seven percent. Why should parents be required to pay to support intercollegiate athletics in order for their kids to get an education at one of Virginia’s public colleges or universities?