At my school (Georgia Tech) the athletic program not only doesn't take any money from the rest of school, it actually earns money for our school through licensing deals and ticket sales.
Fellow techie. Did you forget about the mandatory athletic fee of about $250/year[1]? It covers about 7% of the athletic departments total expenses[2]. I believe there were other backdoor mechanisms that allowed for transfers of school funds to the athletic department, though I don't recall the details well enough to contest it.
Starting a few years ago, all Iowa public university Athletics programs were required to basically have separate finances and not be pulling funds from the rest of the university. It took the University of Northern Iowa a bit longer to achieve, but all three regents universities are successfully not taking money from tuition or normal state funding.
It certainly can be done. Iowa also has a balanced budget provision in its constitution. Not sure if it's in any way related, but it'd be understandable that taxpayers wouldn't want to be pouring money into athletics programs. That's not the primary intent of funding universities.
I'm from Iowa and went to a high school of around 2,000 students. They built a ~15M dollar stadium which was completed right after the marching band season. Not quite the $50M stadium(s) of Texas, but still excessive.
> But you went to Georgia Tech. Most schools with athletics programs are not Georgia Tech.
I don't have a quick summary of all the financials of all the schools in the country and whether athletics is a net positive/negative. I did find a datasource which could at least guide the discussion. [1] An anecdote doesn't prove the rule - but can help make a case that "it can be done".
Iowa, Iowa State, and University of Northern Iowa are ranked 18, 47, and 142 respectively out of 230 programs listed. Georgia Tech is #42. The three Iowa universities, each in different divisions with vastly different TV revenue share agreements, represent 2.3% of total revenue on the list.
Now, all three have "Student Fees" listed as a portion of their funding. I'm not certain how these are assessed and how it works per the rules the Iowa Board of Regents (governing body) set. The total of student fees is 4.75M out of 245M in revenue. The only university where it'd be a real game changer would be UNI (2M out of 20M revenue).
