Interesting question.
Where will the money come from to support projected future college athletic spending.
It is especially true for Miami and the MAC schools who already rely on student fees.
To echo the sentiment that has been shared many times… nowhere. I don’t think the current arms race is sustainable and the current state of college athletics is not the long term answer.
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Whether it happens officially or just de facto, Division I football will split into 3 division:
Power division (Big Ten, SEC, and I’m guessing some remnant of ACC and Big XII either as separate or combined)
Middle Division: The rest of current FBS (maybe including even some bottom feeding power schools that cant realistically compete with Texas, Ohio State, Alabama, etc.), with probably a few FCS team rising up as financial expectations return to normal with the Big Ten/SEC no longer driving up spending
Lower Division: Basically FCS, except even worse as the top teams move into the new middle division if realistic spending actually happens
For all intents and purposes, the Power/Middle split already exists, everyone just pretends not to acknowledge it.
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Let’s get a Middle Division playoff!
That will be so much more fun than bowl games imo
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Another interesting graph from Tony Altimore on X regarding the challenges of declining enrollment at MAC schools.
Buffalo and UMass are the only schools that have not seen lower enrollments from 2009-2023.
Kent, OU and Miami the best of the rest but he has our enrollment down 10% since 2009.
Akron and CMU down 54%.
He predicts the enrollment challenges will get a lot worse for MAC schools in the next few years before they get better due to demographic changes.
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I wonder how much of “total enrollment” loss is grad programs they shouldn’t have had in the first place.
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I have no idea where these numbers are coming from, but they aren’t right.
Miami reports enrollment data to the dept of Education who publishes them in IPEDS. Per that, Miami’s 22-23 FTE enrollment was 19,393 with 17,554 undergrads. 08-09 was 17,340 with 15,411 undergrads.
19.1k for 23 is close enough to make just be a different data source, but 09 is totally off unless it’s also including other campuses there but not in 23 and still seems too high regardless.
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That is what I thought when reading this thread. I thought we have more students now than ever before.
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I agree that something looks off with our numbers. I sent a question asking Altimore about his source.
However, the major point in the post is correct. There are a lot of demographic challenges to the MAC schools in getting enrollment numbers.
The recent acceptance rate I have seen for Miami is around 88% which is shocking to me.
OU is about the same.
For context, OSU is 57% and Coral Gables is 19%.
Re: Acceptance rate: To assuage your fears, look at the stats of the entering first-year students. It’s pretty impressive.
Also, Coral Gables cost of attendance is around $90K per year (rack rate), soooooo …
Imo Miami is positioned to ride out the storm better than non-flagship universities staring down a demographic decrease based on our program differentiation and expertise in recruiting out-of-state students. That’s not to say there won’t be pain, but we should ground ourselves in a current situation that’s probably not an existential crisis. The likes of Western Illinois or Valparaiso are going to get the worst of it before it hits us, and that gives us time to prepare and adapt.
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Reply post to Altimore on X that his data is wrong. He’ll send you a really passive/aggressive DM about how your response doesn’t further the discussion, lol.
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Agree with L&H here that it’s a challenge but not an existential one for Miami. The same isn’t true for some other MAC schools though.
The most recent acceptance rate was 80%: Admitted Students Statistics | First-Year Application Requirements | Miami University
And the important note there too is that schools like OSU are slightly more selective, but also get way more applicants which lets them reject more.
The middle 50% of admitted students at OSU had an ACT score between the 90th & 98th percentile, while Miami is between the 81st and 95th percentile.
Now that the landscape of major collegiate athletics is becoming a professional sports league, we should drop major athletics altogether, and refocus resources on becoming nationally relevant academically again. So much money is allocated for sports that the vast majority of the student body and alumni have shown again and again that they are indifferent to. And now that significantly more financial resources are required to stay relevant in the major sports, it seems a futile endeavor going forward. Between NIL and dropping out of the the US News top 100, it seems like a good time to pull a U of Chicago.
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University of Chicago has athletic teams. They play in the UAA for most sports except football which is a different conference. Division III. https://athletics.uchicago.edu/
That’s why I specified “major” college sports, papa.
And for the record, I hate the idea. I love watching Miami sports. I catch as many basketball and hockey games as I can, and I never miss a football game. I donate to the athletic fund every year. But I realize that I’m in the extreme minority among Miamians as far as having that devotion to our athletic teams. I’m just trying to be realistic given the current state of things.
… you can pretty much make that argument for any school that is not a P5 school…
When I was there we were capped at about 14k undergrads. We had to turn back some funding to the state for students we enrolled above the cap. That - coupled with the policy of all freshmen being required to live in dorms - made admissions tricky. That was before we opened Hamilton and Middletown.