You have to spend money to make money, or so the adage goes. But Colorado State University’s attempt to solve its financial shortcomings by building a $226 million football stadium seems like a doomed exercise. It also indicates misplaced priorities. Struggling schools should invest in people, not facilities.
We have often complained in these pages about a widespread trend of declining state funding for public institutions, even while state governments and state-appointed governing boards seek to wield more oversight over public schools. Missouri, which now disperses a small share of state aid on the basis of how well college students perform on standardized tests, provides one example of this perplexing move toward decreased funding coupled with increased oversight. Public universities in Colorado, however, have been hit particularly hard. Colorado has cut support for public colleges by 73 percent since 1980: more than any other state, according to the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education.
These developments have had CSU eyeing out-of-state students, who dish out $23,347 in annual tuition — roughly three times what Colorado residents pay.
So CSU has devised a plan: to build an on-campus football stadium that will lure better athletes, increase sports revenue and attract more out-of-state students. Or so administrators hope. This plan seems unconventional. But it is in line with a cynical philosophy that too many mid-tier schools have bought into: that the pathway up the U.S. News & World report rankings consists of fancy buildings and bigger stadiums.
CSU’s current stadium is located roughly 3.6 miles from the school’s campus. The Rams, which play against middling teams in the Mountain West Conference, have trouble selling out the facility’s 32,500 seats.
And CSU’s recent facilities projects have not boosted the school’s proportion of out-of-state undergraduates. The university has spent $690 million on facilities in the last six years, including a $32 million renovation to its recreation center to install an indoor climbing wall and a smoothie bar. Yet the school’s proportion of nonresident undergraduates has remained flat at 19 percent between 2003 and 2012.
This record suggests that facilities spending is not a tactic that will work well for CSU in its efforts to attract more out-of-state students. And there are no guarantees that the mammoth project will bring in more football revenue. For comparison: the University of Akron opened a $62 million on-campus stadium in 2009. The Ohio school saw an initial bump in attendance, but by 2010 the athletics department was shilling out more in debt payments than it was bringing in from ticket sales.
CSU administrators hope to fund the stadium half through private donations, half through borrowing bonds. To move forward with the project, the school must raise $125 million by October 2014. So far it has secured $37 million after nearly two years of fundraising.
The stadium plan is based on far too many leaps: first, that the stadium will attract better athletes; second, that it will draw more fans and increase sports revenue; third, that it will entice out-of-state students. CSU’s administrators seem to be focusing imaginative energies on the hypothetical stadium as if it were a talisman, a cure-all for the school’s mid-tier reputation and mid-tier finances.
But we object to the stadium proposal not because it is financially unrealistic but because it shows misplaced values. Far too many schools, hungry to move up in the rankings, opt to spend on facilities while faculty, research centers and other academic projects become a secondary priority.
The idea that CSU president Tony Frank voiced in an interview with the Wall Street Journal — that out-of-staters assess an institution’s academic quality “largely on perception and visibility from athletics” — demonstrates an unusual degree of cynicism. Athletic success can help a school’s public image, to be sure. But if we think that the way to improve a school’s academic reputation is to spend not on academics but on athletics, something is clearly wrong here.
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