The rising cost of college has dissuaded many from pursuing a degree and caused millions more to go deep into debt. One important factor contributing to this trend is the amount many institutions spend on intercollegiate athletics.

About twenty large universities, such as Penn State and the University of Alabama, have successful football teams that generate enough profit to pay for all the men’s and women’s sports programs. The intercollegiate athletic programs of more than one thousand other schools lose money and need to be subsidized, usually by mandatory fees charged to all students, whether they are participants, spectators, or indifferent to sports.

The fees are usually lower at large universities than at small colleges. Some large universities have football teams—and a few have basketball teams—which generate a profit and support a part of the remaining athletic budget. All other men’s sports and all women’s sports—except maybe University of Iowa Women’s basketball—lose money. A Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) program, which generates a profit, offsets some of the losses of other sports and reduces the amount of money from student fees and other institutional support needed to pay for the sports programs. In addition, successful football programs are usually at large public flagship universities with very large enrollments, so the cost of subsidizing sports is spread over tens of thousands of students, thereby costing each student less. At the University of Virginia, with 16,000 students, the mandatory intercollegiate athletic fee is $720 per year, and at Virginia Tech, where there are 28,000 students, the mandatory fee is $384.

The College of William and Mary does not have a lucrative football program and has less than 9,000 students. The mandatory fee is $2,177. The school contributes another $250 per FTE student as well. That comes to almost $10,000 per student over four years just for small-time intercollegiate sports. The average debt of a William and Mary graduate is $35,500, so just over a quarter of that is due to intercollegiate athletics.

Longwood University is a public institution with 3,500 undergraduate students. It has no football program. The annual mandatory student fee for intercollegiate athletics is $3,197. The average amount of loans taken out by first-year students at Longwood University is $7,262, 44 percent of which is directly attributable to intercollegiate athletics fees. And that’s for Longwood University sports.

The cost of upgrading an athletic program to the top tier is astronomical. Rutgers University has borrowed over a quarter of a billion dollars to try to compete with Big 10 powerhouses. That money has to come from the students directly or from other funds that are diverted from their benefit.

No discussion about college sports is complete without mentioning Title IX. In 1972, Congress amended the Higher Education Act to prohibit exclusion from educational programs based on sex. The amendment did not mention sports, and there is no indication that it intended to affect college sports.

The NCAA has interpreted this law as saying there cannot be an economic justification for favoring profitable teams. So, while men’s football and sometimes basketball programs are the economic engines that drive the train, they cannot get preferential treatment with respect to less lucrative sports. The number of scholarships and quality of facilities must be the same for men and women. To field a Division I FBS team, by NCAA rules, a college must give 76 to 85 football scholarships. To be compliant with Title IX, a school must also have an equal number of scholarships for women’s sports. If a school didn’t have those before Title IX was initiated, it had to add those scholarships. It has cost a lot of money to do so.

I am not rendering a judgment as to whether Title IX is good or bad. Airbags have made cars much safer, but they have added to the cost of the car. Adding women’s sports, essentially none of which turns a profit, means that, somehow, the institution must come up with millions of dollars to pay for them. In most cases, the cost has been passed on to students in the form of higher mandatory fees.

Colleges and universities, which are rated highest for enabling large numbers of students to climb the economic ladder, according to the Mobility Report Card by Chetty et al., do not spend large sums of money on athletic programs. City College of New York spent $57 per student per year on intercollegiate sports. Low student spending on intercollegiate sports is not the prime reason for improved social mobility, but, in many cases, it is a necessary condition that must be present for it to take place.

With rare exceptions, spending on athletics adds significantly to the cost of a college education, even though it is not one of the stated missions of colleges and universities. It is a luxury imposed upon students, causing many to go deeply into debt while pricing countless others out of pursuing a degree.

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