Richard K. Vedder is a distinguished professor of economics emeritus at Ohio University and author of Going Broke by Degree: Why College Costs Too Much.

He crunches the numbers and asserts that as universities rapidly increase their spending on intercollegiate sports, they fail to invest in the needed resources for teaching and research.

WITH the college football bowls under way, all most of us will care about are the winners. But as a nation purporting to care about the costs of higher education, we should pay far more attention to the many losers.

Thanks to a newly available database, we can grasp the ugly truth: Universities are increasing their spending on intercollegiate sports exponentially, far faster than they are investing resources in teaching and research, and at rates that force higher institutional subsidies, usually paid by students.

The trove of information comes from the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics, a group dominated by past and present university presidents and committed to “restoring the balance” of costs and benefits to college sports.

Consider this eye-popping figure: Among the more than 100 top athletic powers (the football bowl subdivision), which enroll more than 3 million students, inflation-adjusted academic spending per student rose a modest 8 percent from 2005 to 2011. Meanwhile, “athletic spending per athlete” rose by more than 38 percent. (This is based on the 90 schools for which data were available.) At the same time, university subsidies — “institutional funding for athletics per athlete” — expanded on average by an extraordinary 51 percent, despite rising television and ticket revenue. Commercial receipts covered only 74 cents of each extra dollar of costs incurred in this athletics arms race.

In 2011, median academic spending per student at these schools was $13,736, while athletic spending per athlete was seven times as much — $96,948. Some of the highest-spending teams (such as No. 2-ranked Auburn University, which spent more than $212,000 per athlete) obtain large revenue from television, tickets, concessions and branding, so they can claim their investment has paid off.

But the cost-benefit balance doesn’t look the same at, say, Rutgers University, where spending per athlete more than doubled from 2005 to 2011, and inflation-adjusted academic spending was flat. Or at my school, Ohio University, where inflation-adjusted academic spending per student fell about 6 percent, while inflation-adjusted spending per athlete rose 77 percent….

Schools spend more for two reasons. First, they calculate that athletic spending will lead to more victories, and with that more revenue. Second, they gamble that the spending will improve national name recognition and enhance student admissions demand, improving the school’s reputation. In reality, neither occurs often.