Stanford is known for having some of the top academics and athletics in the world. Could the university at “the farm” be spending too much time and money on athletics?

The Stanford Daily reports.

The price of athletics at Stanford

“It will cost Stanford Athletics almost $100 million to put Cardinal teams in competition this year.” So reads Stanford’s Student-Athlete Handbook, which goes on to explain that only “approximately one third comes from ticket sales and television rights revenue” – the net annual cost is thus around $67 million. Is this money well spent?

The question I want to focus on is not whether the athletics department spends its allocated budget efficiently, but rather whether the university should be giving athletics such a large budget at all. To put things in perspective, Stanford will spend $256 million this academic year on financial aid. If we reallocated the university’s net spending on athletics into financial aid, we could raise Stanford’s aid generosity by 25 percent. By spending so much on athletics, Stanford is passing up other opportunities.

Stanford’s commitment to athletics is reflected not just in its budget, but also in the composition of its student body. Out of its 7,000 undergraduates, about 900 are student-athletes and there are 300 athletic scholarships divided amongst this student-athlete population. But here again there is a tradeoff. For one, athletics is a serious time commitment. The NCAA limits playing season practice to 20 hours a week, which teams tend to use in full. This inevitably detracts from the student-athlete’s academic commitments. As Richard Sherman put it at a recent press conference: “Show me how you’re going to get all your work done when after you get out at 7:30 or so, you’ve got a test the next day, you’re dead tired from practice and you still have to study just as hard as everybody else.” The more we emphasize athletics, the less time students have to spend on academics.